Jeff Bezos fund ends support for climate group amid fears billionaires ‘bowing down’ to Trump
Jeff Bezos’s $10bn climate and biodiversity fund has halted its funding of one of the world’s most important climate certification organisations, amid broader concerns US billionaires are “bowing down to Trump” and his anti-climate action rhetoric.
The Bezos Earth Fund has stopped its support for the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), an international body that assesses if companies are decarbonising in line with the Paris agreement. Earth Fund had been one of two core funders of the SBTi, with the Ikea Foundation: the two accounted for 61% of its total funding last year. Earth Fund’s decision was first reported by the FT.
Spokespeople for Earth Fund and SBTi said the $18m grant had been a three-year commitment that expired as previously agreed, and Earth Fund had not made a final decision on future support. But researchers familiar with the SBTi, as well as advisers at the organisation, raised concerns that the vanishing support was part of a broader trend of wealthy individuals moving away from funding causes that the US president – who has previously called climate change a hoax – did not agree with.
COA Professor Doreen Stabinsky, who is on the technical council of SBTi, said: “You look at Bezos and the folks he’s hanging out with in the billionaires club, and you realise this is about more than SBTi,” she said. “Bezos is bowing down to Trump in a way a bunch of billionaires are bowing down to Trump.”
Stabinsky said Bezos’s decision was “not surprising at all” given he previously stopped the editorial board of the Washington Post – which he owns – taking an endorsement position on presidential candidates.