The Climate Racket Bezos Bought
How strategic philanthropy creates rigidity in science and politics
Jeff Bezos, founder of the online marketplace Amazon and big data entrepreneur, is a late comer to the environmental establishment. In 2020, tarred and feathered by an employee uprising over the perceived inadequacy of Amazon’s attention to climate change, Bezos announced the establishment of the Bezos Earth Fund (BEF) and gave $10 billion to address climate change.
Bezos recruited the then-President and CEO of World Resources Institute (WRI) Andrew Steer to run the Bezos Earth Fund.1 This brought together one of the wealthiest men in the world with one of the most elite environmental organizations. BEF has also provided funding for other environmental organizations including the common passthroughs like ClimateWorks.
A few weeks ago, Substack writer,
, struck a collective nerve with his thoughts about Jeff Bezos’ venture in what he calls the “philanthro-capitalist delusion:”the idea that billionaires can buy their way into virtue with just enough gala invitations, foundation launches, and pocket-change donations.
The post went viral with with nearly 9,000 likes as I write.
There are current and historical concerns about the heavy- and tax free- influence that philanthropy by the ultra wealthy has on policy and politics, including its ability to create entire governing regimes.
Strategic philanthropy adds to rigidity of the agenda that interest groups can create by providing a deep pocketed source of funding that is accountable to no one and may reflect little to nothing of broader public interests.
The advantage to Bezos being so late to the environmental game is that an examination of where BEF shows up in the climate advocacy (or elsewhere) illuminates how strategic philanthropy can so heavy handedly shape politics.
The image below is a select, non-comprehensive snapshot in the funding and relationships held by the Bezos Earth Fund. I will briefly discuss each bubble separately to explain how all the parts serves to create rigidity in science, policy, and politics.
I go piece by piece which makes for a lengthy write up.
Social Movement
Systems Transformation Lab
The orienting framework for the Bezos Earth Fund, as illustrated by their landing page above, is the Systems Transformation Lab. This approach orients their work to a set of targets aimed at wholesale transformation of society. This includes energy, finance, economy, circularity, and so on.
Tipping Points/ Univ. of Exeter Global Systems Institute
As described in the Systems Transformation Lab brief technical documentation, its foundational concept is the “tipping point.” The term has a muddled existence.
Adoption of tipping points in climate science circles follows the term’s success in popular culture, and, according to a history of it, reflects want for a rhetorical device of urgency as well as its applicability to describing social change and technology dissemination.
One way “tipping point” is used is to elicit the idea of cascading earth systems plummeting into a Hot House Earth.
That the earth’s climate system has experienced abrupt climate change in the past is well established (e.g. ice ages). It is highly questionable, however, that Earth systems have identifiable and/or predictable tipping points defined by the IPCC as “critical threshold(s) beyond which a system reorganizes, often abruptly and/or irreversibly.”
Another way tipping point is used is to describe the point of acceleration in an theorized model of an S-curve of social change. This usage of the phrase gets pretty wild.
Bezos funded activities uses both meanings of the phrase2. BEF funds regular reports by the tipping point folks at the University of Exeter and is sponsoring an event of theirs this summer.
BEF is very supportive of this work. Upon the release of the report featured in the image above, a Bezos Earth Fund rep stated:
At Bezos Earth Fund, we are dedicated to identifying and triggering positive tipping points in this decisive decade.
And what are some indicators of positive tipping?
Climate litigation
De-financing of fossil fuels
Passing international ecocide criminal law
And so on…
Earth Commission
The image showing Bezos funding of the Tipping Points report above also shows the logo of the Earth Commission. The Earth Commission is the scientific steering committee of the Global Commons Alliance, which is coalition of NGOs and funding entities seeking transformation.
The Earth Commission is hosted by Future Earth, which is the current stage of social ecosystem modeling community once known as the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme.
Head of the Earth Commission is the guy that developed the Planetary Boundaries framework. The Planetary Boundaries framework presents a normative framework of boundaries around the metaphorical earth tipping points.
It is a highly influential campaign best understood as a brand and has a dedicated advertising agency. It has made its way into methods of climate financial risk calculations and underpins the current concept of planetary health.
The tipping points and the planetary boundaries guys are frequent collaborators, co-hosts of the BEF funded tipping points event, and sit on the Earth Commission.
They write of increased centralized governance of the Earth system which will “challenge barriers of state sovereignty and self-determination.” As such, the Tipping Point report states:
Preventing the transgression of Earth system tipping points should become the core goal and logic of an urgently needed global governance framework.
Take Away: The Bezos Earth Fund approaches its funding using methodology that situates tipping points at its core. Bezos Earth Fund sponsors and works closely with a core group of researchers that
spread an advocacy message of catastrophe,
pursue domestic and international legal strategies targeting national energy and resource policies, and
seek a central governing regime of the Earth organized around theoretical “tipping points” and requires a weakening of national sovereignty
Extreme Event Attribution and Advocacy
In 2022, BEF announced a $10million award to the following organizations, among others, for Advancing and Communicating the Science of Extreme Weather Attribution.
World Weather Attribution (WWA)
The WWA is a niche group of researchers who develop and pursue extreme event attribution studies for use in advocacy and seeking liability for extreme weather disaster losses. The methods, according to WWA founder, “have been conceived with litigation in mind.”
The methods of the WWA are prone to bias, misrepresent climate models, and have a host of other issues. The broader practice of extreme event attribution has been professionalized with many practitioners using different methods.
Climate Central
A US based analytics NGO that distributes graphics to 95% of U.S. media markets. Climate Central prides themselves on launching the World Weather Attribution and “changing the narrative on links between climate change and individual extreme weather events.” Bringing the two together is the point; accuracy of the message takes a back seat.
Climate Central presentation for the National Academy of Science (see below) Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
A university housed research program that studies public opinion on climate change and develops and tests advocacy messaging about climate change. YPCCC works in collaboration with Climate Central. The head of the YPCCC is also on the board of Potential Energy, a strategic political campaign consultancy, which produces the Science Mom campaign. Science Moms used Super Bowl ad space to (inaccurately) attribute the devastation of the Palisades Fires to climate change.
YPCCC group works closely with the Center for Climate Change Communication at GMU which does much the same as YPCCC, has a partnership with Climate Central, and has embedded itself in the climate and health discourse.
To legitimize this approach, BEF funded an assessment report at a legendary institution of science advice in the United States, the National Academy of Science. 3
National Academy of Science4
BEF funds the creation of an assessment report that engaged expertise and representatives from the above organizations on several occasions. A regular focus of the assessment information collection is on WWA methods with speakers involved with WWA, climate litigation, and climate change advocacy.
Take Away: The Bezos Earth Fund strategically funds organizations to produce, disseminate, and legitimize a controversial methodology created to pursue high profile domestic and international litigation targeting nations’ energy policy. The messaging misconstrues knowledge about the cause of disasters and complexities of extreme weather. BEF funding opens up a window onto the tightly choreographed activities among agents of political messaging and marketing of technological practices.
Emissions and Mitigation Scenarios
Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC) & Future Earth
The IAMC is an organization that designs the socioeconomic assumptions of emissions scenarios used by the IPCC for projecting climate change and identifying mitigation options, and for regulators of climate financial risk disclosures, and perhaps others. In 2022, BEF funded an IAMC annual meeting. Now a BEF staff member is on the advisory committee of the IAMC (also a ClimateWorks rep, of course).
The reason I also mention Future Earth here is because of the close collaborations between Future Earth and the World Climate Research Program (WCRP). The WCRP hosts the small community of researchers, known as the ScenarioMIP, that characterize the emission scenarios for the IPCC (ie. how many, how much). These are the people that choose to maintain implausible- if not impossible- estimates of emission futures.
There is a good amount of overlap between the those on the IAMC and those on the ScenarioMIP. Moreover, some influential individuals among them are also on the Earth Commission (the people that want central governance of the earth) hosted by Future Earth. Of the three co-chairs of the ScenarioMIP steering committee one is listed as on the Earth Commission and one is listed as a senior advisor to Climate Central.
Take Away: Bezos Earth Fund has a direct line of oversight to scenario development used in climate change projections and mitigation by the IPCC.
No consider the outline above in reverse order.
Bezos Earth Fund is:
overseeing the design of climate change scenarios for use by the IPCC with is valuable assessment process used to guide public understanding and policy decisions regarding energy and climate all over the world,
funds a sophisticated political marketing campaign to shape public opinion around inaccurate representations of the relationship between energy, climate, and disasters
using one of the most prestigious institution in American science advice to shore up a controversial technical practice used in domestic and international liability litigation,
advance a social agenda built around the dubious tipping points genre advanced by researchers looking to transform global society while weakening the sovereignty of nations.
Clearly, this presents (or reveals) a host of issues for democracy, science, and international relations.
Most of the organizations present here have been chugging along doing as they do for decades. They have long been funded by private philanthropies. But Bezos is new, so, its easier to see how philanthropy weighs heavily on politics by organizing activities to advance niche agendas.
Steer left BEF this year and was replaced by BEF General Council, Doug Varley, a legal expert in exempt organizations practice.
The technical note references both Lenton et al 2008 and Lenton 2020
A Bezos Earth Fund representative is also a committee member to the National Academy of Medicine quest for transformation in health. The broader committee includes those in planetary health (built on planetary boundaries), a former member of the Earth Commission, head of the Center for Climate Change Communication at GMU.
It’s a shame the National Academies have gone this route.
Steer was a good choice for Bezos.
“philanthro-capitalist delusion:” = the idea that billionaires can buy their way into virtue with just enough gala invitations, foundation launches, and pocket-change donations.
Agree. To buy virtue you have to actually fund advocacy of good policy or data collection/analysis to support it.
Classic. People who are really good at something think they can be good at everything… so they try to rationally design the world, because hey why not?