Front Burner - Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' $10B climate pledge

Episode Date: February 20, 2020

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said this week he will donate $10 billion to fight climate change — working with others "both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting thedevastating impact of climate change." Today on Front Burner, we ask: What can $10 billion do for the environment? Guest host Michelle Shephard talks to David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, which describes the frightening consequences of global warming.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Michelle Shepherd, filling in for Jamie Poisson. So if you didn't hear, the world's richest person just donated $10 billion to combat climate change. On Monday, Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, announced on Instagram that he was creating his very own Earth Fund. announced on Instagram that he was creating his very own Earth Fund. He wrote that he will, quote,

work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change. Even for a man like Jeff Bezos, this is not chump change. He's dedicating about 7.7% of his current net worth to the cause. Amazon employees for climate justice writing, we applaud Jeff Bezos's philanthropy, but one hand cannot give what the other is taking away. Today we ask, what can $10 billion do for the environment? David Wallace-Wells is my guest. He wrote about climate change crisis in his book, The Uninhabitable Earth. It gives a frightening prediction of what life will

look like if the planet keeps warming at the rate it has. This is FrontBurner. Hi, David. Thank you for joining me today. My pleasure. Good to be here. So Bezos says that his initiative will fund scientists, activists, NGOs, and offer, quote, a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world. But there aren't a lot of details beyond that. What do you make of his announcement? Well, I think in general, we're not in a position where we can really judge it yet.

We're just going off of a few sentences on an Instagram post. And exactly as you say, we don't really know what form or shape these donations will take. In general, I think big picture, $10 billion is an enormous amount of money. It's perhaps twice as much as has been spent to this point by American philanthropists of any kind fighting climate change. And so for that reason, it's worth celebrating. It may be even bigger than the total amount of money that's been funneled globally into what's called the Green Climate Fund, which is this thing that was set up during the Paris Accords to help the developing nations of the world deal with some of the impacts from climate change. It was meant to channel money from the world's richer countries to the world's poorer countries. 2019 was an important year for GCF.

We've pledges from nearly 30 countries totaling $9.8 billion. And Bezos has kind of single-handedly committed as much money as has been collected in that entire fund. So from that perspective, it's a huge gesture that could generate much more activity and progress than any philanthropic spending on climate has yet produced. On the other hand, I think that the much more relevant perspective is not what has been done before, but what we need to do. And by that metric, $10 billion, though it sounds like an enormous amount of money, and in almost every, by almost any standard, is an enormous amount of money, and by almost any standard is an enormous

amount of money, by the standards of the climate crisis is actually pathetically small. The most optimistic assessment that I know of for how much it would cost to decarbonize the world's economy is $73 trillion. So we're talking about Bezos making a commitment that's less than one seven thousandth of that amount of spend. In the U.S., we're talking about, you know, some varieties of the Green New Deal. Bernie Sanders version costs 16 trillion dollars. Elizabeth Warren's costs about nine or 10. People are telling me the plan you just released to combat climate change is expensive. But the cost of doing nothing is far more expensive.

I believe our best shot, in fact, I believe our only shot is to make the investment increase by tenfold what we're spending. And that to me is just another sign among many when it comes to climate that what we need to really do is redirect our politics and our policy because the kinds of changes we need are so large they can really only be achieved through public policy changes, not through philanthropy or even individual investment or entrepreneurship. Well, maybe then as a start, we could sort of start there. What could the $10 billion buy in a small scale? What could you see that going towards that could, however small, make that difference that might prompt other differences?

Well, there's been an interesting conversation since the announcement was made among climate advocates about exactly how Beza should spend this money. And some people think it's useful to spend on research and development. Others want to see it spent deploying existing technologies, given that the timeline for climate action is relatively short. But an interesting consensus has sort of emerged, which is that the money would actually be most effectively spent campaigning for climate leaders to be elected to positions of public prominence, public office, because that is actually the major constraint on aggressive climate action. We have technology.

We have the technology we need to start taking action today. The reason we don't is because we don't have interest among those shaping our public policy. But when you talk about particular projects, it's just another sign of how big a challenge this is and how small $10 billion really is. You know, in New York City, we've just been talking about a proposal put forward by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a seawall to protect most of New York, which they say would cost $119 billion. No one can forget Superstorm Sandy hitting along the coast of the Northeast, leaving a destructive path. It's because of that that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

have come up with plans to prevent ocean surge from flooding. The six-mile-long barrier with retractable gates would stretch from the Rockaways in Queens across New York Harbor to New Jersey to protect the area. This is one seawall in one metropolis in the entire country protecting us probably in imperfect ways given shortcomings in the design. But some environmental groups are pushing back against the idea of barrier walls altogether saying it could harm marine life. Other communities could see worse flooding. Against a single climate impact

sea level rise and it costs more than 11, almost 12 times what Bezos is contemplating giving. Climate change, the impacts are so large, every time you zoom in on a particular project, the cost of dealing with it is enormous. It's just a reminder of just how big this challenge, this crisis really is, and just how all-encompassing it is, because it's not just one project or one technology we need to deploy. We need to deploy new solutions and new approaches to almost every aspect of modern life, from industry to agriculture to transportation and infrastructure. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization.

Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Is there any indication, though, that that's the direction that Bezos would go in, that he might actually use this investment to help the politicians who are campaigning on various green new deals and those who are promoting the decarbonization of the economy? I would guess that he won't move in that direction. I think that his history of statements about concern about the planet suggests that he has a quite particular, and I would say mostly, you know, counterproductive perspective on the climate crisis. He's spoken a lot about his dreams of colonizing the rest of the universe and other planets. What happens when unlimited demand

meets finite resources? Rationing. And that path does not lead, it would lead for the first time to where your grandchildren and their grandchildren would have worse lives than you. The good news is that if we move out into the solar system, for all practical purposes, we have unlimited resources. Building habitable ecosystems off of planet Earth as a kind of a backstop, you know, a way of hedging our bets. It's kind of like his plan B, that he's going to invest in these rockets so he can get the hell out of here if it gets really bad. Totally. Heavy industry and all the polluting industry, all the things that are damaging our planet, those will be done off Earth. We have to save this planet.

And we shouldn't give up a future for our grandchildren's grandchildren of dynamism and growth. We can have both. Even though anyone who studies this knows that making Mars habitable would be much more expensive and more complicated than making sure that Earth remains habitable, he's focusing on other exploration of the rest of the solar system and the universe. I think that tells you a little bit about where his focus is, which is that he's really interested in sort of breakthrough technologies and new frontiers more than doing the kind of hard, complicated, but in certain ways banal work of deploying the technology we have

through the political systems that now exist in order to make the planet that we all share comfortable for everyone that's here. This generation's job, my generation's job, is to build the infrastructure. We're going to build a road to space and then amazing things will happen. Then you'll see entrepreneurial creativity. Then you'll have space entrepreneurs start a company in their dorm room. I think in general, I'm skeptical that Bezos' personal commitments and personal perspective is as productive on climate as they might be in the hands of someone else spending $10 billion. On the other hand, I don't want to dismiss what he's doing. He is committing an enormous amount of his fortune to this crisis, which is laudable. And I think the most responsible thing for all of us to do is not to judge him for sort of silly or misguided statements he's made about these issues in the past, but to just press him to make commitments today so that the spending that he does commit through this pledge actually goes towards productive means.

But this does come after quite a bit of criticism that he's received over Amazon, his company's contributions to the climate crisis. Maybe we could just talk a little bit about that, just to note what's happened in the last couple of years in terms of his own employees criticizing what the company has done. Yeah, there's been an enormous sort of labor issue for Amazon in that a large segment of their employees have really continuously voiced concerns about the carbon footprint and the ecological legacy of

Amazon, which is, you know, ultimately for everything else it does, it's a kind of a logistics company. They do a lot of shipping. They do a lot of transportation. They do a lot of packaging. They work in a lot of areas, unlike some other tech companies, that really do produce a quite immediate and dramatic carbon emission footprint. I'm walking out on September 20th because we should be leaders on climate action and not followers. I know Amazon is capable of quick and bold action, and I believe the world needs Amazon to take big steps to avert the climate crisis.

More recently, it's been talked about quite a lot, really especially since this announcement was made, that their cloud computing and AI work. You know, they've been doing a lot of work in that area with fossil fuel companies. So they're essentially helping in the production of fossil fuels, even as their executive is now making this large-scale commitment to saving the planet. My name is Weston Fribley, and I've been an engineer at Amazon for over four years. When smoke covers Seattle again this summer, when fires

destroy our data centers, when storms shut down our warehouses, why is Amazon still burning fossil fuel? What response was there from Amazon to that criticism? Well, in general, like a lot of companies, they've tried to present their behavior as being climate responsible. Last year, Bezos co-founded the Climate Pledge for Businesses, committing Amazon to net zero carbon emissions by 2040 and 100% renewable energy by 2030. It's a difficult challenge for us because we have deep, large, physical infrastructure. We can do this. Anyone can do this. They've talked about the way that they're helping making, you know, for instance, the fossil fuel business more efficient. I would say in general, they haven't

had a satisfactory, comprehensive, or real searching response to the criticism. I think they see themselves, like a lot of tech companies, as they just understand their work as being valuable and important and don't feel the need to really justify it by anyone else's terms. And that's been essentially the response to this climate criticism. Now, whether or not he was moving towards making a grand gesture on climate, it's hard to know. He's a quite closed-off private individual. But I don't think it's a coincidence that following a year of

heightened and more intense scrutiny about the company's carbon footprint that the CEO makes a large gesture in the other direction. I think that that's sort of the way business is done these days. This is Earth. It's the best planet in the solar system. We know that because we've sent robotic probes. It's the only good planet in the solar system and We know that because we've sent robotic probes. It's the only good planet in the solar system, and we need to take care of it. This illustrates something about the current state of the climate crisis and our collective response to it. So many people in positions of power, both in politics and in business, feel comfortable making gestures in one direction towards the need for climate action

while they're simultaneously doing business in ways that actually make the problem worse. So I think, you know, we've left behind the era of climate denial and we're starting to live more and more in a place of climate hypocrisy. And I think that that really that's true of almost everyone. In fact, probably you and me as well. I think Jeff Bezos is more responsible than, needs to be more responsible than I am. I think Justin Trudeau needs to be more responsible than the average citizen of Canada. So the more power and wealth that you have, the more responsibility you have to eliminate that hypocrisy. And I think that's really obviously very well-found cynicism about this climate hypocrisy. But do you think there's any reason for hope that this could start a larger movement of corporations or just rich people trying to be good?

You know, what we've seen a little bit of these companies shift away from the shareholder primacy, they say, the ideas that companies have to put profits first. I think it was just last month that CEO of BlackRock, which oversees $7 trillion worth of funds, announced that they'd be moving money away from fossil fuels. I wrote it in mind to try to inform more people of where we believe asset allocation is going, where we believe the world of finance is moving towards, and we all need to be better prepared. Does any of this, in your mind, show a little bit of a trend, a positive trend? Absolutely. I think things are moving in the right direction. The problem is that they're not moving nearly fast enough. And some of the commitments, I think, we have to scrutinize a little bit more than we do reflexively. So the BlackRock announcement, it's obviously a major deal.

This is the world's largest asset manager. And they're saying, you know, we're going to put climate change considerations at the heart of our investment decisions. And so we believe this is a process, not just, we're not stopping. We believe in most cases, fossil fuels will not be a good investment, but we are not saying they're not a bad investment today either. That really was unthinkable a few years ago. And if it takes hold, then would really lead us to a quite different place. On the other hand, to this point, practically speaking, all that it's meant is that BlackRock is disinvesting from coal,

which is already effectively not a profitable investment. And they're planning to continue to invest in oil and gas, which remain profitable, but also are catastrophic for the climate. When you take seriously the timeline that scientists tell us we have, you know, we need much, much faster action than anything we've seen before. The UN says in order to avert catastrophic warming, we need to decarbonize as a planet at about seven or eight percent per year every year this decade, and then accelerate in the decades after that. Now, no country in the entire world in all of human history

has ever decarbonized for a single year at that rate. And the UN says that we need to decarbonize globally, all of us, every single year between now and 2030. So we're starting to see the kinds of commitments that might have been sufficient if they had been made, say, in the year 2000. But they're coming far too late in the game to alone make a difference. That said, you know, the fact that the momentum is moving so quickly is exciting, not just because of what it means we're doing now, not just because of what it means about the commitments made by people like Bezos and Fink today, but because of what it suggests is possible to imagine just a few years down the line,

that people in those positions could be making even more aggressive commitments two or three years from now, which is ultimately what we need. And I think the same dynamic applies to politics, the kinds of protest politics that we've seen over the last year on climate. People will vote if there is something worth voting for. And a Green New Deal is exactly what that is. What you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?

Were unthinkable a few years ago, and they're producing political changes and policy commitments that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. They're still themselves insufficient. But if that trajectory continues, if that momentum continues, then two or three years from now, what today is considered impossible will then start to seem feasible. Essentially, you're saying the private sector just is unable to do this. I mean, billionaires aren't going to save us from the climate crisis alone. And governments have so far been unwilling or unable to do it. How then does the private sector step in where governments have fallen short or pressure governments to do the dramatic changes that we need to speed up that

timeline? Well, I think a lot of it is just seizing the business opportunities that are already there. You know, there are, I mean, honestly, just huge fortunes to be made in renewable energy. If you take seriously the idea that over the next couple of decades, we're going to completely decarbonize our power systems. That means that there are going to be made in renewable energy. If you take seriously the idea that over the next couple of decades we're going to completely decarbonize our power systems, that means that there are going to be whole new industries created, not quite from scratch, because we do have some amount of renewable capacity today,

but we're going to be growing that capacity by as much as 10 times over the next few decades. There is an enormous amount of business opportunity there. And because there are profits to be made, it means that the government doesn't even really need to be involved. Now they can put their hands, government can put its hand on the lever a little bit, paying some subsidy, or maybe more importantly,

withdrawing the subsidies that are today being paid to fossil fuel businesses. But the truth is that in the absence of any government intervention, it still is the case that probably private enterprise would be decarbonizing our power sector quite rapidly. And that's not just the case in places like Canada and the U.S. where we're relatively well off and we can afford to make major investments in renewable energy. It's even the case in a place like India, which is one of the critical nations of the world for climate, because they're still going through the rapid economic growth that tends to produce the most carbon emissions. So I think that the thing that entrepreneurs can do best is simply to follow those paths and to make sure that those transformations are

brought about as quickly as they possibly can be. And if your phone were to ring tomorrow morning and it's Jeff Bezos, and he says, David, I've read your book, I've listened to you, what do I do with this Earth Fund? I know you've articulated that over the course of this interview, but if you had just a few key points to deliver to them, what would you say? The best thing to do would be to give targeted grants to companies that have developed technology but don't yet have the capital to scale them meaningfully. So we have, for instance, carbon capture technology machines, which can suck carbon out of the atmosphere. But there's no market for that carbon once it's sucked out of the atmosphere, and it's relatively expensive to do it.

But theoretically, if we can push deployment through philanthropic support, we can start to demonstrate some more uses that could then earn more capital investment down the line. I do think that spending on lobbying and political campaigning is probably quite effective. I do think that spending on lobbying and political campaigning is probably quite effective. And I also think that there's some it's worthwhile to some degree to spend in research and development, because, you know, the truth is, especially on this whole category of what's called negative emissions, all these ways that we can take carbon out of the atmosphere, probably in the second half of the century, we're going to need a lot more of that than we can even imagine today. And I think he can probably help in all of those ways. David, I really appreciate you coming on today. Thanks so much.

Thanks for having me. Speaking of billionaires, last night in Nevada, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg took part in a Democratic presidential debate. Debates have been taking place since June, but this is the first time that Bloomberg has been included. I think we have two questions to face tonight. One is, who can beat Donald Trump? And number two, who can do the job if they get into the White House? And I would argue that I am the candidate that can do exactly

both of those things. He was a late entry to the party nomination race, but his popularity is rising in public polls. That might have something to do with how Bloomberg is pouring his $60 million fortune into his national campaign. That's it for today. I'm Michelle Shepard, filling in for Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner.