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Jeff Bezos Commits $10B to Address Climate Change

nytimes.com

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Re: Jeff Bezos Commits $10B to Address Climate Change

#31

Post by rpiguy »

klausjensen wrote: post #6
rpiguy wrote: post #2

Billionaire invests $10B dollars to virtue signal and control the behavior of the poor, while not changing his lifestyle at all. 165M dollar environmentally excessive mansion, private jets, and a rocket program that dumps carbon into the air. I’ll be impressed when billionaires actually make sacrifices themselves, rather than just write checks. Checks are important, but let’s be real about these people.

What do you think actually makes the most difference: a) Donating $10B b) Reducing his personal environmental impact to zero You are literally more interested in virtue signalling than making actual change.

I dislike gross displays of privilege. Being rich and advocating for everyone else to reduce consumption while maintaining your own lavish, polluting lifestyle simply because you have the money to “offset” it is obscene.

Re: Jeff Bezos Commits $10B to Address Climate Change

#32

Post by UnpossibleJim »

throwaway6734 wrote: post #4
rpiguy wrote: post #2

Billionaire invests $10B dollars to virtue signal and control the behavior of the poor, while not changing his lifestyle at all. 165M dollar environmentally excessive mansion, private jets, and a rocket program that dumps carbon into the air. I’ll be impressed when billionaires actually make sacrifices themselves, rather than just write checks. Checks are important, but let’s be real about these people.

>I’ll be impressed when billionaires actually make sacrifices themselves, rather than just write checks. Why? Jeff Bezos donating that much money to combat climate change will have a much larger positive good than the negative things you outlined that he does.

He's also switching majority (I'm unsure as to the amount and the timeframe of his delivery trucks to electric). With pressure from someone like Bezos putting vehicle fleets on electric, that could put the US on the path to build a much needed electric vehicle infrastructure.

Re: Jeff Bezos Commits $10B to Address Climate Change

#33

Post by dmd »

rpiguy wrote: post #26
melling wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sacrificing isn't going to solve the problem. Saying that people need to do that seems to be it's own virtue signal. Climate change is billions of people over decades. Bezos can't sacrifice enough to make a difference.

I do not believe in climate change. I also do not believe in a ruling elite advocating reduced consumption by others while consuming and emitting all they want simply because they have the money to “offset” it. It is an obscene display of privilege.

I do not believe in gravity, and yet.

Re: Jeff Bezos Commits $10B to Address Climate Change

#35

Post by tdstein »

kirstenbirgit wrote: post #10
rpiguy wrote: post #2

Billionaire invests $10B dollars to virtue signal and control the behavior of the poor, while not changing his lifestyle at all. 165M dollar environmentally excessive mansion, private jets, and a rocket program that dumps carbon into the air. I’ll be impressed when billionaires actually make sacrifices themselves, rather than just write checks. Checks are important, but let’s be real about these people.

I think these kinds of opinions are really dangerous–we cannot just expect society to go back to the stone age. It's why the average human is blocking climate change out, the changes have to come in the form of e.g. CO2 taxes and broad regulation. Climate is not the responsibility of the individual citizen. It's bad enough as it is, we don't need to feel guilty every day about small things like using a plastic straw…

Sharing shit information like this is why the average human is blocking climate change out. No one is suggesting going back to the Stone Age. Your plastic straw use isn’t warming the planet. But, you should consider the impact flying a jet has on the earth.

Re: Jeff Bezos Commits $10B to Address Climate Change

#36

Post by ericd »

rpiguy wrote: post #21
ericd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon emissions are fungible. Rockets are fine as long as we find ways to extract an equivalent amount of carbon. And carbon capture programs need a source of revenue to be built out, so this is more helpful than him turning down his personal emissions to zero. It sounds more like you find it unfair that he gets to live the way he does.

No I find it unfair that many celebrity climate advocates preach limited consumption while consuming vast amounts of energy, carbon, etc. themselves.

I've never seen Bezos push for personal austerity, have you? He's trying to move their fleets to EVs and transition data centers to renewable energy, those aren't a limited consumption measure.

Re: Jeff Bezos Commits $10B to Address Climate Change

#37

Post by everdrive »

rpiguy wrote: post #31
klausjensen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think actually makes the most difference: a) Donating $10B b) Reducing his personal environmental impact to zero You are literally more interested in virtue signalling than making actual change.

I dislike gross displays of privilege. Being rich and advocating for everyone else to reduce consumption while maintaining your own lavish, polluting lifestyle simply because you have the money to “offset” it is obscene.

Isn't it possible that Bezos is not a hero due to moral complications, but also that this effort of his will have a positive impact?

Re: Jeff Bezos Commits $10B to Address Climate Change

#39

Post by dx87 »

rpiguy wrote: post #2

Billionaire invests $10B dollars to virtue signal and control the behavior of the poor, while not changing his lifestyle at all. 165M dollar environmentally excessive mansion, private jets, and a rocket program that dumps carbon into the air. I’ll be impressed when billionaires actually make sacrifices themselves, rather than just write checks. Checks are important, but let’s be real about these people.

> I’ll be impressed when billionaires actually make sacrifices themselves

Donating 10 billion dollars sounds like a pretty big sacrifice.

Re: Jeff Bezos Commits $10B to Address Climate Change

#40

Post by Symmetry »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #7

Do we know how much emissions can be attributed to Amazon / AWS? I'm curious if this $10 billion fund could offset that or if it's too small to cover their own use. Though, to be fair to Amazon, this is at least a good goal: > Amazon expects 80% of its energy use to come from renewable energy sources by 2024, up from a current rate of 40%, before transition to zero emissions by 2030.

It all depends on whether you're comparing to a counterfactual or not. If you compare the emissions caused by AWS to those emissions simply not happening then that's a pretty severe source of carbon. If you compare it to companies hosting all that computing themselves then I think it's a pretty clear economic win. If you think that a lot of that would be self-hosted but many of the uses simply wouldn't exist then it's hard to say.

For Amazon I really feel like I have no idea about it. With warehouses instead of big box stores you've got a lot less volume being lighted and heated plus a lot of individual cars driving to a central place are replaced by a few large delivery fans then that's the same sort of win you get from people switching to driving the bus. But two-day shipping for rare items that involves flying them across the country is terrible for the environment. So I don't think that I have any clue what the net environmental impact of Amazon has been.

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