Billionaires aren’t going to save the planet. Part I: Marc Benioff’s trillion trees

Four years after Benioff announced the trillion trees initiative, Bloomberg takes a look at how it's going.

PHOTO Credit: Bloomberg.

Salesforce is is a US software company. It was incorporated in 1999, in the tax haven of Delaware. The company develops Customer Relationship Management software, which is basically a way that companies can find out and store more information about you, in order to sell you more stuff.

Salesforce was co-founded by a former Oracle executive called Marc Benioff. He also owns Time magazine. In 2006, he finished building a US$24.5 million beachside mansion on Hawaii’s Big Island.

Since 2000, Benioff has bought almost 40 plots of lots through at least six anonymous limited liability companies, and one non-profit, an investigation by NPR revealed earlier this year. “[W]e’re really only here to have a home for our family and then to give,” Benioff told NPR. “We don’t have outsized properties. We have basically enough for ourselves.”

Hawaii is about 3,800 kilometres from San Francisco, where Salesforce is based. That’s some commute.

Salesforce’s headquarters in San Francisco is a giant eyesore designed by the architect César Pelli.

This wasn’t an accidental choice of a dodgy architect by Salesforce. In addition to San Franscisco, Salesforce inhabits similar monstrosities in Chicago, Indianapolis, Dublin, New York, Sydney, London, and Tokyo:

Meanwhile, NPR reports that,

Salesforce also paid $0 in federal taxes from 2018 to 2020, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. When asked for comment, a Salesforce spokesperson says the company “fully complies with all tax laws.”

“Longtime advocate for the environment”

All of this makes it surprising to read that Benioff, who is worth US$9.52 billion, is “a longtime advocate for the environment”.

But that’s exactly how Bloomberg described him in a recent article.

In 2020, Benioff travelled to Davos for the World Economic Forum. He wore a black suit and black tie, and told CNBC that he was “at a funeral for capitalism here at Davos”.

“You know that capitalism is dead and that we are introducing a new capitalism here, a stakeholder capitalism, which is a more sustainable capitalism, a more equitable capitalism, a more fair, a more just capitalism. The old capitalism was all about Milton Friedman, the business, business, business, money, money, money. And the new capitalism is, the new stakeholder capitalism is business is the greatest platform for change.”

CNBC’s Sara Eisen doesn’t interview Benioff. It’s a Benioff promotional video. At one point she even waves a copy of Time magazine at the camera.

“You’ve been out front on this issue, it seems like everyone else is catching up,” Eisen tells Benioff.

Benioff makes the ludicrous claim that, “It’s why I started my company 21 years ago.”

Salesforce is a “net zero company, because the planet is a stakeholder”, Benioff says.

Since Eisen doesn’t challenge Benioff at any point during the interview, I’ll state the obvious. Salesforce is not an environmental organisation. It exists to make it easier for companies to sell things. It helps turn consumption into over-consumption.

Here’s how a Salesforce corporate video explains what the company’s Customer Relationship Management software actually does:

“Let’s say you’re running a shoe company and you’ve got a customer, Emilia. You can know all kinds of things about her like her purchase history. She PR’d her half-marathon in those road shoes. When and why she called customer service because of that one time her package never arrived. That she attended the in-store event last month, and her running posture is way better since that form clinic. That she subscribes to your email so that she can see the latest running news and race updates. And her browsing habits on your website.”

It’s surveillance capitalism, in other words.

Salesforce sells its software to more than 150,000 companies, who use it to sell more. Customers include Heathrow Airport, Formula 1, Amazon, Walmart, Bayer, KLM, BP, and Delta Air Lines.

Trillion trees

During the 2020 Davos meeting, Benioff announced the Trillion Trees Initiative. “The most efficient way to sequester carbon is the tree. It’s the tree,” Benioff tells CNBC. “Nobody’s against trees.”

Benioff tells CNBC that “President Trump has joined 1t.org”, along with the Chinese government, the European government [sic], the President of Colombia, and over 300 companies. That was within 48 hours of announcing 1t.org, Benioff says.

After four years, less than 0.3% of the target achieved

In May 2024, Bloomberg took a look at how Benioff’s trillion trees initiative is going. Not great, is Bloomberg’s conclusion.

The target is one trillion trees by 2030. In total 134.4 billion trees have been pledged. But only 2.6 billion have actually been conserved or planted. That leaves another 997.4 billion trees by 2030.

Here’s how Bloomberg describes the problem:

The total number of trees pledged to 1t.org to date amounts to less than 15% of 1 trillion. And with flexible rules on who can pledge what, and little accountability to ensure follow-through, it’s impossible to know how many trees the project has actually planted or saved so far: By the partial count of WEF and American Forests, which co-runs 1t.org’s US Chapter, the number is as much as 2.6 billion trees — more than 997 billion short of the goal.

After four years, 1t.org has planted or conserved less than 0.3% of its target.

A World Economic Forum spokesperson told Bloomberg that WEF has “a rigorous process to track the implementation.” But the spokesperson added that this “rigorous process” relies “on transparency and reporting by the companies themselves”.

85 companies have made pledges to conserve or plant trees. That makes Benioff’s claim four years ago in Davos that 300 companies had joined 1t.org look more than a little silly.

The companies have pledged about 10.3 billion trees, according to Bloomberg. (The rest of the pledges are from governments — some running programmes that have little or nothing to do with 1t.org.)

AJE Group, a Peruvian drinks company, accounts for more than one-third of the total pledges.

Carbon offsets

One-fifth of the companies that have made pledges make use of carbon offsets. WEF did not respond to Bloomberg’s question about guidelines for using carbon offsets towards pledges.

Using carbon offsets means that every ton of carbon (temporarily) sucked out of the atmosphere by the trees planted or conserved under the trillion trees initiative is cancelled out by the sale of a carbon offset to a company that will emit a ton of carbon by burning fossil fuels.

One trillion trees would cover an area equivalent to three times the area of India. There isn’t enough land available on the planet to address the climate crisis by planting trees. Tree planting is a distraction from the urgent need to dramatically reduce emissions by burning fossil fuels.

Some of the pledges come from companies with fossil fuel operations, such as Italian oil corporation, Eni, Canadian oil and gas company Frontera Energy, and Indian coal trader Adani Group. Others include APRIL and Suzano, two of the world’s biggest, and most destructive, pulp and paper companies. Then there are massive transnational corporations such as Amazon, Bayer, Del Monte, Mahindra Group, Nestle, Meta, PepsiCo, Unilever, and Vale.

Bloomberg notes that,

WEF says companies must have a credible net-zero pledge to take part in the program. However, the global standard-setter Science Based Targets initiative removed seven of the companies’ climate goals from its database for not being rigorous enough. More than 1.3 billion trees were promised by these companies.

The companies removed from SBTi’s database include AJE Group, Clif Bar & Company, Vale, Adani Group, Unilever, and Amazon.

The pledges that companies have made under 1t.org are not consistent. Nestle says it will plant 200 million trees. Amazon says it will fund US$100 million for reforestation and conservation. Eni says it will conserve forests to avoid 15 million tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2030. Bank of America says it will “help develop the voluntary carbon offset market which can lead to more tree planting and restoration projects”. Mastercard says it will restore 100 million trees by 2025. Vale says it will recover and protect 500,000 hectares by 2030. Comparing and monitoring progress of the trillion tree target from these very different pledges is pretty much impossible.

Before Bloomberg sent some questions to 1t.org, the trillion trees website showed 103 companies with a total of 12.4 billion trees pledged. Here’s a screenshot of an archived version of what the 1t.org website looked like on 16 April 2014:

And here’s what the website looks like today:

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This is the first of an occasional series on REDD-Monitor: Billionaires aren’t going to save the planet.