Patagonia to give $10M in tax-cut savings to green groups
Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company that has taken on President Donald Trump before, said this week it will donate the $10 million it saved from recent tax cuts to environmental protection groups.
In a scathing note Wednesday, Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario called the GOP- and Trump-backed tax cuts “irresponsible” and decried past political responses to climate change as “woefully inadequate.”
“Instead of putting the money back into our business, we’re responding by putting $10 million back into the planet. Our home planet needs it more than we do,” Marcario wrote in the statement posted on LinkedIn.
Changes to the corporate tax rate went into effect in 2018, giving corporations a boost by dropping their tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.
The company said the donations would be given in addition to its existing “One Percent for the Planet“pledge through which it has promised to donate 1 percent of its sales each year since 1985 for “preservation and restoration of the natural environment.”
Patagonia said it plans to give the $10 million to “groups committed to protecting air, land and water and finding solutions to the climate crisis.”
The company’s announcement comes less than a week after a Trump administration report warned of the dire threat that human-caused climate change poses to the United States and its citizens.
According to the report, recent years have smashed records for damaging weather in the United States, costing nearly $400 billion since 2015. In a worst-case scenario, researchers say, climate change could deliver a 10 percent hit to the nation’s GDP by the end of the century.
The president, however, told reporters “I don’t believe it,” when asked about the conclusions of the report his administration issued.
Trump has long doubted climate change and once called it a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese.
An overwhelming scientific consensus says that recent warming has been caused by human activity.
“Our government continues to ignore the seriousness and causes of the climate crisis. It is pure evil,” Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard said.
Last year, Patagonia had a clear message to Americans after the Trump administration announced its plan to reduce the size of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments: “The president stole your land,” the company said on its website.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blasted Patagonia’s campaign as “nefarious, false and a lie.”
Patagonia soon joined the lawsuits challenging the move.
This year, the company backed Senate bids for two Democrats, Jon Tester of Montana and Jacky Rosen of Nevada, both of whom defeated Republican opponents.