No, Jeff Bezos isn't 'donating' $10 billion to 'fight climate change'.
The media has been reporting that Jeff Bezos has announced that he'll 'donate $10 Billion to fight climate change'. The only problem with this is that he's not "donating" anything. If Bezos truly wanted to donate money to "stop climate change" he could have just donated the money to the UN's "The Green Climate Fund" or any other number of well established green funds who were specifically set up just to fight climate change.
What Bezos is actually doing is setting up a tax free (he's very good at evading paying taxes) private investment fund which will support groups and people in the form of tax free "donations" which will end up benefiting him and his global business empire, Amazon. People and organisation who will aply to get money from this fund will obviously have to fulfill some “green” criteria in their proposals, but does anyone think that someone who wants to study if it's good for the climate to ship every retail item individually to houses, the way Amazon does globally, will get any money from the "Bezos Earth fund"? Or a study about the links Amazon has with many oil and fossile fuel companies, whose cloud computing services and internal communication platforms are provided by Amazon's AWS, will receive any money from Bezos?
What will get funded are studies or groups who will probably benefit Bezos and Amazon's global buisness agenda and ambitions. Bezos and Amazon don't really care, to put it mildly, about "climate change", and only started paying any attention to it fairly recently, when it became fashionable for big corporations to “greenwash” themselves with fake and empty “pro environment” PR gestures. On a personal level, like many other "climate crusaders" from Leo DiCaprio to Bernie Sanders, Bezos likes to use private jets as his main mode of transportation. Jeff Bezos spent $65 million on a Gulfstream G650ER — a private jet that seats eight people. If he really cared about climate change, wouldn't that money be better spent planting trees for example? Bezos is also known for his "green" habit of using mega yachts to get him from A to B in luxury. It's needless to point that those mega yachts sometimes consume the same level of energy as small towns.
Bezos getting off his private jet.
His company, Amazon, is no better at "helping the environment" and in fact it pollutes more than many developed countries. Amazon's co2 pollution was (according to their own figures) 44 million metric tonns in 2018 alone, that's bigger than Angola, a country of 30 million people, and bigger than several European countries combined. So according to the media, a person who's in charge of a company that has been responsible for almost half a billion of metric tons of co2 pollution in the last decade and who uses private jets and mega yachts as his means of transportation is now going to be the one who will "save the world" from climate change?
In conclusion, this is not about “donating money” to “save the planet” as the media would like you to believe, but about Bezos getting a massive tax write off and the ability to leverage his wealth to make even more money through “donations” to "green" causes and organisations, those who will serve his and Amazon's global business agenda and goals.
