By Jo Nova
Back in 2020 nothing was more important than climate change. Swept away by the crisis, Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos set up a $10,000 million dollar fund to ‘fight climate change and protect nature’. It was the largest piece of atmospheric philanthropy known to mankind. But it’s become a bit of a ghost account.
The money was supposed to be spent by 2030, but six years in, 72% of the funds still haven’t been allocated.
Bezos Earth Fund Is Off Pace to Meet $10 Billion Climate Giving Pledge
By Ben Elgin and Sophie Alexander, Bloomberg
Officials at the Bezos Earth Fund said they remain committed to disbursing $10 billion by 2030. With four years left on the timeline, however, only 28% of the promised funds have been allocated so far.
In interviews and statements, Earth Fund executives reaffirmed their plan to spend $10 billion by the end of the decade. “Many of our strategies remain the same,” a spokesperson said…
Now that Trump sucked the government subsidies away from pet climate projects, you’d think the Bezos funding would be more “needed” than ever.
It’s not just Bezos who is backing away slowly
Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Catalyst Halts New Investment, Lays Off Staff
Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates-backed group that bankrolls climate tech, has stopped making new investments from one of its key funds to scale up nascent green technologies, just as the market for these startups is being squeezed by President Donald Trump’s assaults on climate policy.
After supporting 10 startups and spending “high hundreds of millions of dollars,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson said, it has now suspended new investment from the fund.
They all have their excuses for the turnaround
Jeff Bezos says AI will solve climate change. Even though AI is consuming vast quantities of gigawatts, pushing old coal plants back into action, it will undo the crisis about climate change (especially if it accidentally looks at the scientific data, eh?)
The Bezos Earth Fund believes AI will be a solution to the climate crisis.
By Elike Roohi, Alliance
According to the Fund, it is ‘harnessing [AI’s] power to transform how the world addresses climate and nature’.
Dr Stephan Singer, a senior global energy policy adviser with Climate Action Network International, said in a report by the Guardian in 2024: ‘The projects of the Bezos fund do not address the key issues of the fundamental climate crisis we are facing – they are nice but unfortunately cosmetic.’
Dr Singer was discussing the Fund’s big bet on carbon offsetting schemes, widely understood to do little to mitigate global heating.
Bill Gates says technology has already saved us
Gates was thrilled at how well the decarbonization plan was going. If we pretend that giant unaccountable organizations like the IEA make useful predictions, rather than hyperbolic spam, then things are going much better than they might have been in the IEA doomer imaginary future.
Bill Gates Highlights Massive 40% Drop in Projected CO₂ Emissions
In a LinkedIn post published yesterday, Microsoft co-founder and climate investor Bill Gates shared an optimistic update on global energy-related CO₂ emissions that challenges much of the prevailing doom-and-gloom narrative.
The key graphic Gates posted tells the story clearly:
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- In 2014, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected that, under then-current policies, the world would be emitting roughly 50 billion tons (50 Gt) of energy-related CO₂ per year by 2040.
- The IEA’s latest 2024 assessment, using the same “current policies” framework, now puts that 2040 figure at just 29 Gt — a stunning 42% reduction in the expected emissions trajectory in only one decade of forecasting updates.
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The 2020s was the ‘decisive decade’, said Bezos. Indeed.
They’ll never say the skeptics were right.