“Evil men don’t get up in the morning saying ‘I’m going to do evil’. They say: ‘I’m going to make the world a better place.'” — Christopher Booker.
Amazon supremo Jeff Bezos has pledged $10 billion of his $130 billion fortune to combating climate change.
This is disgusting, hypocritical and wrong for a number of reasons. And if Bezos imagines that this act of blatant greenwashing will do anything either to save the planet or make the world a better place than he is living in cloud cuckoo land.
The donation, it goes almost without saying, is a classic case of the ugly phenomenon identified by Douglas Murray: the unacceptable face of capitalism trying to burnish its image with ‘very loud, ostentatious appeals to show that they are on board with the zeitgeist.’
If Bezos really wanted to do the right thing, he could pay his workers more or treat them less like slaves. Or he could stop putting quite so much effort into paying as little tax as possible in the various countries where he sells his goods. These are the two issues which — rightly or wrongly — people find most reprehensible about Bezos and his business model: worker exploitation and tax avoidance.
But if Bezos were seriously to address those issues it would cost him a lot of money — much, much more than the paltry $10 billion he is spending on his greenwashing boondoggle, the Bezos Earth Fund — and billionaires don’t get to be billionaires by taking unnecessary losses.
Personally, I’m not so bothered by the way Bezos conducts his business: he provides a popular service, he creates value and should reap the rewards. Nor am I worried about the size of Amazon’s carbon footprint.
According to the Mail:
Amazon said it emitted 44.4million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2018, which is more than some small countries.
Well, so what if it’s even twice or ten times that amount? If this is the CO2 cost of living in a world where you can order something you want on your computer that morning and sometimes get it delivered that afternoon, then bring it on.
No, the only thing that should really concern us about Bezos’s extravagant greenwashing gesture is that it will simply pour gasoline onto the fire of the great climate change scare.
Man-made global warming is the biggest and most expensive lie in the history of the world. It represents the triumph of propaganda over scientific evidence and economic reality.
Not a cent of that $10 billion — that’s ten thousand million dollars, which goes quite a long way even now — is likely to make any difference to the health of the planet.
There’s a big clue in Bezos’s announcement that his global initiative will ‘fund scientists, activists, NGOs – any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.’
Those scientists won’t be serious, sceptical intellects like Princeton’s Prof Will Happer or MIT’s Prof Richard Lindzen: they’ll be the usual bunch of activist second-raters and bloviating charlatans — Michael Mann, say — whose only real interest is in promoting the global warming scam as long as they can because there is so much money in it.
Those activists will, of course, all be on the left — watermelons, essentially: green on the outside, red on the inside — and will continue to promote environmentalism by whatever means possible in order advance the controlling agenda of global eco-fascism.
Those NGOs will be organisations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the WWF – all with budgets the size of large corporations, all dependent on ramping up the scare narrative in order to generate the hysteria that raises their profile, increases subscriptions from the gullible and terrified public, and boosts their power and influence.
What we can expect from Bezos’s $10 billion, in other words, is $10 billion worth of green bullshit spread liberally around the world, scaring impressionable school kids, colonising university departments, misleading the mainstream media, granting shyster politicians the excuse they need to raise taxes and introduce more regulations in the name of ‘saving the planet.’
Meanwhile, the actual planet will carry on oblivious. Sure it won’t exactly benefit from all the extra birds and bats sliced and diced by wind turbines or fried by solar panels; nor will it be helpful that all the real environmental problems which should be addressed — overfishing, depletion of water tables, pollution by the rare earth metals used to build wind turbines, etc — but won’t be addressed because of the fashionable obsession with climate change.
But its average temperature will be altered not one jot by any of the expensive, intrusive measures designed to ‘combat climate change’ because it is not within man’s power to do so, nor do most people on the planet have the appetite for even attempting it because it would cause living standards to collapse.
Global warming is a silly, frivolous and expensive religion which only the stupidly rich can afford to indulge. Bezos is merely the scam’s latest and most outrageously profligate useful idiot.