YNTR: Jeff Bezos Commits $10 Billion to Address Climate Change; Amazon Employees Respond

You Need to Read the New York Times’ Jeff Bezos Commits $10 Billion to Address Climate Change by Karen Weise, and Amazon Employees for Climate Justice’ Twitter thread and full statement in response.

Even for the world’s wealthiest man, this is an enormous amount of money, and not his first investment in fighting the climate crisis. Bezos is a part of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, an investment fund working to “commercialize more new energy technologies, faster.

SEATTLE — Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive and the world’s richest man, said on Monday that he was committing $10 billion to address the climate crisis in a new initiative he called the Bezos Earth Fund.

The effort will fund scientists, activists and nongovernmental organizations, he said in a post on Instagram. Mr. Bezos, who has been pushed by Amazon employees on climate issues, said he expected to start issuing grants this summer.

Via Twitter, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice responded “we applaud Jeff Bezos’ philanthropy, but one hand cannot give what the other is taking away,” and listed actions Amazon could take on climate. Those are: stop offering services to oil and gas companies drilling new wells, stop funding “climate denying” think tanks, move to all-electric trucking to reduce air pollution and climate emissions, and address internal tensions about how members of the group have been treated.

The group, made up of “Amazon employees who believe it’s our responsibility to ensure our business models don’t contribute to the climate crisis,” also issued a full statement via Google docs.

Bring your loved ones together this holiday season to give #GiftsToTheFuture. Each day on the way to welcoming the new year, we'll share a little something you can do to help make it (and many years that follow) better for those you love. enough.co/gifts-to-the-future

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