According to an Instagram post from Feb. 17, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is set to kickstart a brand-new climate project, the Bezos Earth Fund, with a $10 billion donation from — you guessed it — Bezos himself.
“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,” said Bezos’ Instagram caption. “We can save Earth. It’s going to take collective action from big companies, small companies, nation-states, global organizations, and individuals.”
The message? Admirable. Donating such an astronomical sum of money towards the cause of climate change means that Bezos is setting an example for other industry executives, perhaps putting into motion the larger institutional change that must take place within the world’s massive companies in order to slow the process of climate change.
According to NASA’s Global Climate Change website, the average temperature of the earth has increased by 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, and Conservation International notes that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit 408 parts per million in 2018, the highest they’ve been since three million years ago. 2018 also saw the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) craft a report on how the world might keep its global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, claiming that “many of the adverse impacts of climate change will come at the 1.5°C mark.” If business continues as usual, though, this threshold will be reached anytime between ten and 22 years from now.
So, yes, Mr. Bezos — climate change is a worthy cause. It’s just a bit difficult to trust your commitment to the climate cause when Amazon only openly promised to do better for the environment by, for example, reducing its net carbon production to zero by 2040, around five months after over 8,000 Amazon employees petitioned you to make a change last April. Even the new Amazon Climate Pledge does not meet the petition’s demands for zero overall emissions; by promising to reduce net emissions instead, the petition claims, the company can “continue to pollute.”
Whilst the company’s impact on the external world might be offset by its supposed newfound fervor for climate activism, the internal world of Amazon continues to literally run workers off their feet. An article in The Atlantic last updated in December 2019 documented the case of one worker, Candice Dixon, who sustained significant back injuries that put her out of a job just two months after she began working at the Eastvale, California Amazon workhouse. According to the doctor Dixon saw, all of her injuries were work-related. Another worker, Emily Guendelsberger, wrote of her painful experience working for Amazon in her book On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane; in it, she recounts the fact that she needed to buy pain pills from an on-site vending machine after just a few days working at an Amazon warehouse and was given assistance by a fellow worker who claimed she needed “at least four pain meds to get through the day.”
Jeff Bezos’s net worth is somewhere around $130 billion. No one knows the true magnitude of his wealth, and though the 10 billion dollar donation to climate change is certainly a step, it doesn’t say much when Bezos’s overall riches and his company’s history with worker mistreatment are taken into account. The “Bezos Earth Fund,” too, is a self-made charity. Bezos, here, is essentially beholden only to himself, and the money will be committed to whatever causes he deems worthy. For a man who donated 7.7% of his wealth to his own climate change efforts and spent another 0.13% — $165 million — on the most expensive mansion in Los Angeles, it shouldn’t be a challenge to treat Amazon workers humanely, even at the cost of a fraction of the profit Bezos is consistently generating.
According to an Instagram post from Feb. 17, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is set to kickstart a brand-new climate project, the Bezos Earth Fund, with a 10 billion dollar donation from — you guessed it — Bezos himself.
“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,” said Bezos’ Instagram caption. “We can save Earth. It’s going to take collective action from big companies, small companies, nation-states, global organizations, and individuals.”
The message? Admirable. Donating such an astronomical sum of money towards the cause of climate change means that Bezos is setting an example for other industry executives, perhaps putting into motion the larger institutional change that must take place within the world’s massive companies in order to slow the process of climate change.
According to NASA’s Global Climate Change website, the average temperature of the earth has increased by 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, and Conservation International notes that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit 408 parts per million in 2018, the highest they’ve been since three million years ago. 2018 also saw the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) craft a report on how the world might keep its global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, claiming that “many of the adverse impacts of climate change will come at the 1.5°C mark.” If business continues as usual, though, this threshold will be reached anytime between 10 and 22 years from now.
So, yes, Mr. Bezos — climate change is a worthy cause. It’s just a bit difficult to trust your commitment to the climate cause when Amazon only openly promised to do better for the environment by, for example, reducing its net carbon production to zero by 2040, around five months after over 8,000 Amazon employees petitioned you to make a change last April. Even the new Amazon Climate Pledge does not meet the petition’s demands for zero overall emissions; by promising to reduce net emissions instead, the petition claims, the company can “continue to pollute.”
Whilst the company’s impact on the external world might be offset by its supposed newfound fervor for climate activism, the internal world of Amazon continues to literally run workers off their feet. An article in The Atlantic last updated in December 2019 documented the case of one worker, Candice Dixon, who sustained significant back injuries that put her out of a job just two months after she began working at the Eastvale, California Amazon workhouse. According to the doctor Dixon saw, all of her injuries were work-related. Another worker, Emily Guendelsberger, wrote of her painful experience working for Amazon in her book On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane; in it, she recounts the fact that she needed to buy pain pills from an on-site vending machine after just a few days working at an Amazon warehouse and was given assistance by a fellow worker who claimed she needed “at least four pain meds to get through the day.”
Jeff Bezos’s net worth is somewhere around 130 billion dollars. No one knows the true magnitude of his wealth, and though the 10 billion dollar donation to climate change is certainly a step, it doesn’t say much when Bezos’s overall riches and his company’s history with worker mistreatment are taken into account. The “Bezos Earth Fund,” too, is a self-made charity. Bezos, here, is essentially beholden only to himself, and the money will be committed to whatever causes he deems worthy. For a man who donated 7.7% of his wealth to his own climate change efforts and spent another 0.13% — $165 million — on the most expensive mansion in Los Angeles, it shouldn’t be a challenge to treat Amazon workers humanely, even at the cost of a fraction of the profit Bezos is consistently generating.
