Thread: Bezos will spend $10 billion of his own fortune to give out grants to scientists, activists and nonprofits to help fight climate change. Bravo! apne.ws/YpCqkx1
Lots of hot takes today about the new #BezosEarthFund... most of which focus on Bezos’ idiosyncrasies, Amazon’s environmental footprint, or the role of wealth in society. Note: This is not a thread about whether billionaires are bad. vox.com/platform/amp/r… @teddyschleifer /2
As someone who was responsible for $100M+ worth of climate grants for another, ahem, relatively high-profile billionaire philanthropist, I think there’s a relatively obvious yet under-appreciated question posed by Bezos’ $10B pledge... /3
The key question: HOW do you responsibly spend this amount of philanthropic capital? Like, literally, where do you put the money? What do you spend it on? Ten billion goes pretty quick when you’re building something... a sea wall to protect Lower Manhattan or a space rocket... /4
But there just aren’t that many civil society groups, or climate science researchers, who can credibly deploy hundreds of millions of dollars at a clip. Too much focus on topline numbers — how many donors are giving how much. Too little attention to effective grantmaking. /5
Of course, credible, data-driven climate philanthropy is possible. The Sierra Club took $50M & helped retire half of America’s coal fleet in what’s been called the most effective environmental campaign in US history politico.com/agenda/story/2… @MikeGrunwald @brucenilles @CarlPope /6
And yet, even in the most successful cases, grant dollars can distort strategies, destabilize coalitions, or worse... it’s hard to spend $100M effectively, let alone ONE HUNDRED TIMES more! My hope is that the #BezosEarthFund will map out its strategy slowly, and carefully. /7
...and my immediate hope: the brilliant minds of #climatetwitter should think seriously about the best & highest uses of grant capital to accelerate action on climate. Mindful of all the constraints & unintended consequences, what should, say, $1B a year over 10 years pay for?
Some preliminary thoughts from @jtemple:
Honest question, @jtemple, as this is more your world than mine: could $500M a year be responsibly deployed for early stage climate-tech research in labs, per your suggestion? This assumes $1B/yr over 10 yrs, with the other half going to policy advocacy as you suggest...
...but honesty given the lack of ready recipients who could ramp up spending on the latter, I’d imagine it’d need to be more like $750M/year for tech/science research. Is this realistic?
