CLIMATE CHANGE
What Is Jeff Bezos Doing For The World?
Amazon has a massive carbon footprint. What is Bezos doing about it?
Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world. With great money comes great power, and comes great responsibility. What is that responsibility?
Let’s start with Bezos’ business, then look at what he is doing, and then finally at what he should be doing.
Amazon's Impact on the Climate
Amazon is the world's largest online retailer, largest cloud computing company, and fifth-largest video streaming provider. This means two things when it comes to its impact on the environment:
- It delivered nearly 3.5 billion packages in 2019. That means an enormous amount of transportation of goods — via planes, ships, trucks, etc. And this number is much higher now given all the increase in online shopping due to lockdown. My own included.
- Amazon's cloud service owns more than a third of the market, which means huge energy-intensive data centers. Data centers collectively use about 1% of the total electricity consumption of the world, and even though Amazon committed to making its share renewable-powered in 2014, there is little action. Just in Virginia, a data-center hub, only 12% of Amazon's data centers are renewable-powered.
Bezos Earth fund
Amazon certainly has a massive carbon footprint when it comes to any single tech company, and many of its eco-conscious employees are not happy about it. They want their employer to show leadership in tackling the climate crisis. After significant pressure, in February 2020, Bezos pledged $10 billion from his personal wealth for the Bezos Earth Fund.
Many argue that the accumulation of so much wealth is wrong in the first place because it places society at the mercy of the good decisions of a few humans.
The money from Bezos Earth Fund was meant to start rolling in the summer and "fund scientists, activists, NGOs — any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world."
Soon after there was another fund, The Climate Pledge, which aims to fund companies that could help in lowering carbon emissions with $2 billion. While this one has invested in five startups so far, there is little known action about the Earth Fund. Bezos is also not the person who is best known for his transparency, so let's just hope that he uses these well-marketed PR initiatives to indeed tackle the climate crisis. And that he does so quickly.
What Should Bezos Be doing?
People expect billionaires to make decisions that will propel science and technology forward. And that is because many billionaires and their philanthropic efforts have had huge impacts on society. Whether it was John D. Rockefeller's efforts that propelled medical science research in the US to a new level, or Bill Gates who has created waves in reducing infant malaria deaths, many people with wealth can, and have, impacted society in big ways.
Many argue that the accumulation of so much wealth is wrong in the first place because it places society at the mercy of the good decisions of a few humans. Others argue that no matter what the source of wealth, it is wrong to expect these humans to just put their hard-earned money into social good because that is not what they set out to do and how they built their empires.
But however someone may choose to look at it, what about the situation where the way someone is making wealth puts others at risk? It can't be wrong to expect them to pay for it, either through their own innovation or by funding others.
Bezos is clearly underperforming. He not only needs to reduce Amazon's footprint but, at the very least, needs to put his well-marketed climate funds to good use by funding technologies that can help make electrification and shipping cleaner.
Priya Aggarwal works in cleantech and writes about climate change and the environment. She can also be found on Twitter.
Other articles you may like:1. How a Successful Youtube Campaign Raised $20M to Plant 20M Trees2. Can We Make The Polluter Pay?
