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What are the tax implications of this wealth-transfer? Who are the winners?
Are you asking about who is going to get a monetary benefit from this fund that's aiming to keep the biosphere from falling apart?
After reading Winners Take All my level of cynicism is through the roof with headlines like this. $10b of his own personal fortune? That won't results in tax breaks / deduction because can be considered a donation? Or does that include money Amazon-the-company is spending on "climate change" efforts, such as buying electric delivery trucks instead of gas ones? Investments in "green datacenters"? Is any of this new in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As others said, why should it matter? I would be happy even if he got an 100% tax credit. what percent of tax revenue would have gone to climate change vs bombing some civilians in Afghanistan.
We shouldn't care because it's better that a billionaire chooses where that money goes instead of a democratically elected government? I'm not poking fun either. That's really what you seem to be saying. Does this still work if he puts this money towards a cause you're not keen of?
On one level this is to be applauded. On another, shipping cheap plastic junk from China all over the world, to finish up in landfill a few years later, is the very definition of environmental vandalism and is Amazon's core business model.
Climate change is an order of magnitude bigger deal than plastics and garbage.
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>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.
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.
Attributing emissions to Amazon/AWS is not a trivial problem. What you'd really want to estimate is AmazonEmissions-CounterfactualEmissions, which is the emissions caused by companies that would jointly provide the services demanded by consumers from Amazon, in the counterfactual world where Amazon didn't exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emissions_reporting#Gre...
If Amazon reported their emissions, we can corroborate their Scope 1 emissions with other companies' Scope 3 emissions and get an indication of just how much Amazon is directly responsible for.
Amazon, however, discloses nothing. This is the kind of thing that regulations are for. In other countries, disclosure is mandatory, and I would say for our survival as a species, absolutely essential. We need data before we can know what direction to take.
When we do our GHG assessment at the company where I work, we estimate our Scope 3 emissions based on what has been leaked about the location of Amazon's data centres and what we know about the electricity grid in those locations. We look at our CPU usage on the AWS console and estimate the energy required with some assumptions of the hardware.
It introduces a lot of uncertainty and we could do better if Amazon disclosed their emissions.
After reading Winners Take All my level of cynicism is through the roof with headlines like this. $10b of his own personal fortune? That won't results in tax breaks / deduction because can be considered a donation? Or does that include money Amazon-the-company is spending on "climate change" efforts, such as buying electric delivery trucks instead of gas ones? Investments in "green datacenters"? Is any of this new in…
Why does this matter? If he truly is pledging $10B, it can only be a win for society and the future of humanity. It shouldn't really matter if he gets a tax break or not.
Related: “Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy” ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio... )