Bezos says he plans to commit $10 billion to fight climate change
Jeff Bezos announced the formation of the Bezos Earth Fund on Monday, saying it will provide $10 billion in grants to scientists and activists to fund their efforts to fight climate change.
Bezos’s worth is estimated at about $130 billion, making him the richest man in the world.
“Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet,” Bezos said in the announcement on Instagram. “I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share.”
The Amazon founder and CEO said the grants will go to individuals and organizations from around the globe, adding that the effort will “take collective action from big companies, small companies, nation states, global organizations, and individuals.” (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)
He said grants will be issued this summer, and added, “Earth is the one thing we all have in common — let’s protect it, together.”
The fund builds on prior commitments that Bezos has made in recent years to reduce Amazon’s impact on the environment, including signing a “climate pledge” last year that commits the company to operate on 100% renewable electricity by 2030.
Bezos signed the pledge one day before company employees — members of the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice — planned to walk off the job in protest, saying the retailer and tech giant needs to do more to reduce its carbon footprint.
Amazon has a massive environmental imprint, delivering what some experts estimate is more than 1 billion packages a year to consumers in the United States. The company’s Amazon Web Services is also the leading provider of cloud computing to corporate customers, consuming massive amounts of electricity to power its giant data centers.
In January, Amazon warned at least two employees who publicly criticized the company’s environmental policies that they could be fired for future violations of its communications policy.
A lawyer in the e-commerce giant’s employee-relations group sent a letter to two workers quoted in an October Washington Post report, accusing them of violating the company’s external communications policy.