Bezos’ climate fund faces Amazon pollution

As he steps down as CEO of Amazon later this year, Jeff Bezos will have more time to focus on his ‘passions’, including his $ 10 billion Earth Fund aimed at addressing climate change. This is a large amount that could have an extraordinary impact on climate action, but vulnerable communities – including those affected by Amazon’s warehouses – say they have been excluded.

So far, Bezos has allocated only $ 791 million – just under 8 percent of the total fund – to 16 environmental organizations. The injection of cash is still huge. Its grants, announced in November, have already met the budgets of some mainstream advocacy groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund. Most of his grants went to larger organizations with less diverse leadership. Smaller grassroots groups representing communities of color say they have been left out. They ask for recognition and funding. And they want Bezos to do more for communities living with pollution from Amazon’s warehouses.

In February 2020, Bezos promised to share some of his personal fortune with scientists, activists, [and] Climate change NGOs “Since the outbreak of the pandemic in March, Bezos’ personal wealth has risen by more than $ 75 billion. While many other businesses have stalled during home orders, Amazon’s business has grown as more people shop online. Amazon’s greenhouse gas emissions also continued to grow, despite Bezos’ ‘passion’ for climate action and its 2019 commitment to govern in its climate pollution.

‘I’m actually very frustrated about this. He has the opportunity to do so much with the funds he has provided out there, although I would still consider it a change compared to the wealth he has built up from the people’s backs, ”said Gabriela Mendez, a community organizer of the Nonprofit Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice (CCAEJ). CCAEJ fought to clear the air in the Inland Empire of California, a region with some of the worst smog in the country. It is a community that is increasingly dominated by e-commerce warehouses, and a lot of pollution comes from vehicles transporting goods to and from the facilities. Amazon happens to be the largest private employer in the region, so CCAEJ and other local groups have urged the company to guarantee stronger worker protection and switch to electric trucks without release.

According to Mendez, there has been an attack on truck traffic through her neighborhood since an Amazon warehouse nearby opened. “He really needs to look at this and prioritize these communities,” she says.

The five established “big green” groups that benefit most from Bezos ‘Earth Fund each awarded $ 100 million in November, or nearly two-thirds of Bezos’ first round of funding. These are the Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, World Resources Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council. These organizations have traditionally had more influence on politics; for example, the former executive director of the Council for the Defense of Natural Resources, Gina McCarthy, is now Joe Biden’s domestic climate tsar. These are also groups that have historically worked more closely with businesses on sustainability initiatives, such as the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).

The EDF tells The edge he has already received his $ 100 million grant. This equates to about half of the typical operating budget for a year, although he plans to spend the money over three years. The bulk of the spending goes to the launch of a satellite in 2022 to monitor methane emissions, a super-greenhouse gas, and build a platform to make the data publicly available. (Asked if Bezos’ Blue Origin would play a role, EDF said it had previously signed a contract with SpaceX to launch the satellite before receiving an Earth Fund award).

A smaller part of the EDF grant goes to efforts to veterinarian so-called ‘nature-based solutions’. It is popular with companies that want to compensate for their pollution by investing in things like forest conservation. Many of these projects do not permanently capture greenhouse gases, investigations into these carbon offsetting schemes have found. One, a Bloomberg research, was even focused on one of Bezos’ beneficiaries, the Nature Conservation. Nevertheless, companies are buying them up and claiming that they are destroying their carbon footprint. EDF says it is important to fund their efforts to vet these projects.

Several other beneficiaries plan to focus their work on similar ‘nature-based solutions’. Separately, Amazon and other technology companies have led the way in yet unproven technologies that remove carbon dioxide that heats the earth from the atmosphere. Microsoft pledged $ 1 billion and Stripe pledged $ 1 million a year to develop the technology. Until the technology is deployed on a large scale – and there are still questions as to whether it is too expensive and energy-intensive to do so – we will not know whether the investments will succeed in permanently capturing and storing the carbon dioxide . Meanwhile, the planet continues to warm up.

Groups such as the Climate Justice Alliance, a group of organizations aimed at tackling environmental racism, see these market-based solutions as a solution for polluters. By financing such things, companies can say they are tackling climate change. But if they do not wean themselves off fossil fuels at the same time, they are still contributing to the crisis and possibly delaying the transition to cleaner energy. “It reinforces practices that caused the crisis in the first place, to continue the sacrifice areas and do nothing to reduce the emissions at the source,” CJA said in an email.

Therefore, CJA wants to see more funding in the hands of grassroots groups that companies try to stop burning fossil fuels in the first place. They also want to stop pollution at the source, because the emission of greenhouse gases is usually accompanied by soot or other toxins. Capturing greenhouse gases alone relieves companies like Amazon of the health threats posed by those other pollutants.

“No amount of greenwashing will absolve Jeff Bezos or Amazon from the damage they have done to frontline communities and workers, or to our planet,” CJA said. “If the Earth Fund wants to pretend to save the planet, it must send funds directly to grassroots communities that are least responsible and hardest hit by a climate disaster and the kinds of malicious business practices Bezos uses.”

Image: Justine Calma / The Verge

There’s another problem – people of color are more likely than white people to live in polluted areas. Both ClimateWorks and the Union of Concerned Scientists have also been criticized for not having diversity, because the people most affected by pollution do not sit at the table. Both groups have made commitments to include environmental and racial justice in their work.

“We know we can always do more to include the voices of groups working on the front lines,” Shawn Reifsteck, vice president of ClimateWorks, said in an email.

In December, the Climate Justice Alliance asked groups that received funding from Bezos to divert 10 to 25 percent of the money to a composite fund. The fund is managed by grassroots organizers from communities most affected by pollution and climate change. CJA says ‘several’ beneficiaries have agreed to consider it. ClimateWorks says they are in communication with CJA. But others’ hands may be tied. EDF says the funds it received from Bezos are limited to its two projects on methane and nature-based solutions.

‘The reason we ended up with these two projects is that Jeff [Bezos], when he first called us to talk about what he was doing, we talked about a number of things that were important – and these were some ideas he was interested in, ‘says Fred Krupp, president of the EOF .

Because less than 2 percent of global philanthropy is the solution to the climate crisis, Bezos’ money has an extraordinary effect. According to ClimateWorks, very few of the existing philanthropy deal with inequalities in the environment and races. So far, Bezos’ donations have continued.

“By any measure, the $ 10 billion commitment to the Bezos Earth Fund is changing,” said Reifsteck of ClimateWorks. Bezos has not yet said how long it will take to distribute the entire $ 10 billion. Yet the amount is ten times as much as foundations usually give in one year. And Bezos’ first round of funding did include smaller grants to scraper groups. These include the NDN Collective, founded in 2018 by a diverse group of Native American activists to support Native American campaigns and sustainability initiatives, and the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice, launched in 2019 to raise money for women of color-led organizations. .

“The Bezos Earth Fund’s first round of funding included a total of $ 151 million in funding to five organizations with deep roots and expertise in environmental justice,” a Bezos Earth Fund representative said in an email. “The groups use this money to give their own grants to hundreds of smaller-scale organizations doing critical climate work in communities across the U.S., and to build and scale their own infrastructure and impact.”

Yet the Inner Empire, where Mendez lives, has not seen anything “game-changing” since Bezos’ fund came off the ground. Instead, they are struggling with more polluting infrastructure that is spreading across the region. Amazon, for example, plans to move to an air freight logistics center. And while their communities may use the funding, they are concerned about Bezos’ extraordinary influence. Will climate groups avoid putting pressure on Amazon to bring in the Bezos donations?

“If these organizations receive those dollars from the Earth Fund, will there be strings attached?” says Faraz Rizvi, a special project coordinator who works with Mendez at CCAEJ. “Overall, I remain a little pessimistic about the fact that these funds can still hold Amazon liable.”