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Bezos Earth Fund Grants $400M for Greening Underserved Urban U.S. Communities

bezosearthfund.org

21–30 of 105 posts

Re: Bezos Earth Fund Grants $400M for Greening Underserved Urban U.S. Communities

#21
Wow, I'm not entirely clear what the grantees are specifically doing from reading this announcement, but I am sure there will be tons of awesome work accomplished.

I do wonder exactly what the theory of change here is - this is a huge amount of money, and I am surprised it's a great way to spend it, especially when the Inflation Reduction Act just authorized so much money for similar goals. I didn't dig into the individual grants, though the ones I peeked at didn't get too specific on what that work is.

Parks, trees, and community gardens are all great. My general expectation in my experience is that poor urban communities are disproportionately often in park-heavy areas (not for justice reasons, for floodplain reasons). I guess they need work to make them better? I like community gardens, but I am just shocked if folks are helping much to solve anything that matters by dedicating dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars to promoting them.

I am extremely skeptical that the climate mitigations cited are very well-accomplished by the green spaces mentioned. It's obligatory to cite climate change in everything, which gets frustrating, especially because we are engaged in so few of the things that would actually help.

Re: Bezos Earth Fund Grants $400M for Greening Underserved Urban U.S. Communities

#22
> The Greening America’s Cities initiative launches with $50 million for urban greening efforts in five cities–Albuquerque, Atlanta...

This is ironic given that Atlanta currently has 85 acres of prime greenspace that the city is spending $90M+ to turn into a police training center:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cop_City

Re: Bezos Earth Fund Grants $400M for Greening Underserved Urban U.S. Communities

#23
post #17

Greenwashing. $400M is about what AMZN spent on the totally-unwanted LOTR reboot.

It's bigger than that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Corporation_of_New_Yo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation

And now

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Philanthropy (not significant enough yet to warrant it's own page)

A classic move by exploitative billionaires to launder their legacy. But what's the alternative? NOT doing it? We should support it, and shame the billionaires that DON'T. do this.

Re: Bezos Earth Fund Grants $400M for Greening Underserved Urban U.S. Communities

#24
post #17

Greenwashing. $400M is about what AMZN spent on the totally-unwanted LOTR reboot.

That doesn't mean that $400MM is a small amount of money, it means the LOTR reboot was an expensive TV show or whatever it was. It is a large amount of money.

Re: Bezos Earth Fund Grants $400M for Greening Underserved Urban U.S. Communities

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the unpaid taxes he owes? Tax evasion is a felony, go turn him and collect your reward.

Tax avoidance is not a crime. Evasion is. All these billionaires know how to skirt the rules.

Are they not paying their taxes or deferring? Because, whatever billionaires do, you can do too. It's legal.

Re: Bezos Earth Fund Grants $400M for Greening Underserved Urban U.S. Communities

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax avoidance is not a crime. Evasion is. All these billionaires know how to skirt the rules.

If they're skirting the rules, that's just called following the rules. Why should we expect billionaires to file their taxes suboptimally? The rules are what need changing.

Yes- that's why people in the comments keep griping about how little tax he has to pay

Re: Bezos Earth Fund Grants $400M for Greening Underserved Urban U.S. Communities

#28
post #3

Be better if he just paid taxes.

> Bezos’s annual reported income during these years of $832 million put him only at number 15. He paid an effective tax rate of 23.2% ; as we’ve previously reported, Bezos had so little income in a couple of recent years that he was able to pay $0 in federal income taxes in those periods. https://www.propublica.org/article/americas-top-15-earners-a...

I always like how good old Warren Buffett is calling for high earners to be taxed more, yet he never seems to show up on any of these high earner lists...

Re: Bezos Earth Fund Grants $400M for Greening Underserved Urban U.S. Communities

#29
post #3

Be better if he just paid taxes.

Taxes -> Uncle Sam -> Some Politician Pockets -> Dumbass projects, pointless initiatives [sometimes fueled by lobbying] -> Maybe some of it finally towards underprivileged communities with a 25% chance? Donating directly to the communities removes all this mess and gets money where it needs to go.

We all want to do it that way then.. I will choose my own ways to spend the tax dollars as I see fit? Too bad we don’t live in such a society
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