Chris White Tech Reporter
February 17, 2020 3:54 PM ET
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced Monday a $10-billion plan to tackle what he says is the most important threat facing human beings: man-made global warming.
Bezos is pressing forward with what he dubbed the Bezos Earth Fund, an initiative he hopes will spur investments to find climate solutions. His statement came as Amazon workers continue to threaten a mass walkout over the company’s supposed lack of climate action.
“Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet,” the billionaire wrote in a statement. “We can save Earth. It’s going to take collective action from big companies, small companies, nation states, global organizations, and individuals.”
Bezos noted that he is providing a $10-billion infusion of cash to kick off the initiative.
“Earth is the one thing we all have in common — let’s protect it together,” he added. (RELATED: Amazon Has Spent Nearly $1.5 Million On Seattle’s City Council Races In 2019)
Amazon employees created a group called Employees for Climate Justice, which published a statement in January updating its plans to allow company employees to speak to the press in September.
More than 1,000 employees walked off their jobs in September 2019 in support of a national march calling on Bezos to do more on global warming.
“Now is a time when we need to have communications policies that let us speak honestly about our company’s role in the climate crisis,” Karen Costa, a user experience principal designer at Amazon, said in a statement in January.
Bezos’s worth fell to $111.4 billion in 2019 after he divorced his wife in April of that year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He lost more money than any other human on the planet that year. He was worth roughly $150 billion before the split.
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That’s another $10B to be fed to the Green Blob.
If he spends it on Gen IV nuclear, it will be money well spent. Otherwise, simple more wet stuff into the wind. Cheers –
That’s what I thought too. Gen IV being economically superior, Bezos could perhaps build 3 of them and maybe close a few coal stations along the way. Then he’d be a hero.
Worst case, he’ll give the money away to enemies of real science.
Bezos can save the Earth for $10 billion?
Great! Write the check, save the Earth, and then we can all move on to something else.
Everyone is tired of Climate this and Climate that. About time somebody fixed it, and it only takes $10 billion. Who knew?
Just have a small question…
Why did this idiot get a pardon?
Trump-ron
https://milkeninstitute.org/videos/if-we-do-nothing-earths-climate-tipping-point
Someone just lost a LOT of votes and anither term. The Cohen fellow (enron) who is an advisor seals the deal.
Let us all keep track of what it funds, cannon fodder for us.
Is 10 billion enough to halt the precession of the earth’s spin axis? Was Jeff’s purchase last week of a 126 million estate for his girlfriend a part of his fight against climate change ?
Ten billion dollars is chump change compared to the multi-trillion dollars that have already been wasted on renewable energy schemes that have had negligible impact on global energy use and contributed insignificant reductions in emissions that are completely overwhelmed by increased fossil energy use. This commitment is pure politics and meaningless in impact.
To these GreenSlime billionaires and funds like CalPERS heavily invested in the solar and wind scam, the billion$ on the propaganda campaigns … it’s just a marketing/advertisement cost towards the Trillion$ they hope to reap.
They know to make a thousand bucks, you gotta spend a buck. Now multiply that by 10^9, and you have your climate scam, along with all the rent seekers it brings as teet-suckers and shoe-shine boys.
We should welcome Bezos’ money to finance all the global climate doomsayers and thus save the U.S. Gov’t all of the funds it now wastes on “climate research.” Thanks, Jeff
How’s the funding for the Paris Climate Accord going? Didn’t UN have a $10bln start up goal ramping up to $100bln/yr starting in 2020. I suspect pledging countries are woefully short on their payments.
Jeff, if you really want to waste your $10bln quickly, just donate it to this UN Green Energy Fund that is already set up to spend big buck$ and save the Earth from Climate Change.
Time to post this again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c&t=381s
JPP
“Save the planet!?!?!? The planet doesn’t need saving. Some people are (beep), but the planet’s doing just fine.” George Carlin ( A wise man. Pay close attention to what he had to say.)
The year my father turned 20, Canada entered World War II. World War II was actually pretty bad, as global disasters go, as at least 60 million people (many of them quite good-looking) died in it. But now, apparently, WW II can be judged as a minor catastrophe in comparison to Climate Change which, if the predictions of the scientists are correct, will result in the climate of Edmonton in 2050 becoming as bad the climate in Lethbridge today. Oh, the horror.
Bezos should spend that $10 billion building an O’Neill Habitat in orbit. Then he will have a whole new world he can play with. He can adjust the temperature to any level he likes.
Out of left field – If Mr Bezos happens to be following this thread! Do I have a proposal for you! I have developed an innovative surface profile that can reduce skin friction by 40%. This is a development on the type of surfaces that were banned in yacht racing for the unfair advantage but offer much greater reduction in skin friction than 3M achieved.
This new surface profile would save 40% on all transport costs in fluid domains – air and water and up to 30% in road transport.
The concept evolved from adaptive surfaces often seen in nature but never exploited in modern transport apart from briefly in yacht racing.
At this stage the surfaces have been modelled and perfected at laboratory and workshop level. $10M would enable the surfaces to be further developed and prototyped for ships, aircraft and road vehicles. $100M would enable proofing of production processes for creating these surface on all transport vehicles. $2.5bn would enable factories to be constructed to manufacture the new surface on an OEM basis as well as supplying proprietary tooling to vehicle manufacturers.
The surfaces are also applicable to the blades of wind turbines and would increase efficiency such that output would be better than 98% of the Betz limit.
Hey RickWill, when Jeff has advanced you the money and is looking for another great investment option that will, “save the world”, he can come and help me with my Thorium fuel cell. It is a simple idea but proving a touch tricky, controlling the uranium triggers. I also have a bridge he might be interested in.
He seems like a generous sort of guy…
Anne ol Bezos should read the next article here about recycling! Think his billions would be better suited to preventing us soiling the place than causing a few tenths of a degree warming.
His Amazon box airpacks//bubble wraps in the many millions of boxes/packages/bubble envelopes that go out of Amazon’s warehouses everyday shows where his eco-sense lies. There’s is nothing he can do about it without shutting down his whole operation, just like the gas and diesel his fleet of delivery big rig and local trucks consumes everyday.
Amazon delivered a package yesterday containing two small tubes of ointment. The box they were packed in was about the size of a lunch box and almost the whole volume was packed out with a kind of bubble wrap with huge bubbles. It was delvered using a diesel van (I don’t mind the CO2, but I don’t like diesel fumes).
A good place to start.
Was there something wrong with the engine? Modern (adblue) diesels don’t do ‘fumes’.
Try telling that to the 485000 people who die each year due to diarrhoeal disease, the 785 million people who lack even a basic drinking-water service and the 2 billion people who use a drinking water source contaminated with faeces.
Source
Facts have no place in a Climate Science ™ argument you need to model it or get Nick to define the terms.
You could add wars and conflicts to you numbers but that wont’ change the belief that more imaginary people are modeled and defined as harmed by climate science than any of your real facts.
Too many people, anyway. They’ll just breed more dependents.
Bezos could figure out what his company uses in electrical power everyday, and then build enough nuclear power generation to equal his company’s electrical usage, and then I think he could legitimately claim that he has offset all of his company’s fossil fuel use.
10 billion because he won’t read a graph.
Bezos is certainly a genius!!
Money cures everything. Climate change especially. We just have not thrown enough money at it yet to stop the climate change. Keep sending checks. When the climate stops tossing hurricanes, floods, heat waves and melting summer ice in the arctic regions, you’ll know we have enough cash.
Bill Gates is actually doing something of great value – he has been financing Thorium molten salt small nuclear reactors for years. Unfortunately, he has not publicized the value of this revolutionary technnology very well. If Bezos knew squat about energy technology he would be doing the same.
Gates is quite bright.
$10 Billion invested in Gen 4 Nuclear could be productive in lowering future energy costs.
Bezos is an “Off Worlder” whack job, so that $10 Billion will just enrich our country’s enemies…and give credence to the Climate Fraud Crime Syndicate.
So, CAGW is an existential threat to human-kind, yet he can only afford to spend ~7.5% of his net worth to prevent it? How much you want to bet that his accountants told him he wouldn’t be able to deduct more than $10B. As many have already commented, most (all?) of it will be wasted anyways. Don’t fool yourself; he’s just buying indulgences. Big indulgences to be sure, but then he has a massively wasteful lifestyle he needs to “atone” for.
He is simply buying an insurance from the green mob.
What’s left unsaid in this particular article is that the large majority of the $10B is going to activist groups and agitators, and not to projects designed to actually address the perceived problem. So expect a lot more suffocating BS from the usual climate catastrophists.
The feeding frenzy has already begun:
How climate scientists, activists, and NGOs want to spend Jeff Bezos’ money:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/19/21143044/jeff-bezos-climate-change-donation-scientists-earth-fund-activists-ngo