Billionaires aren’t going to save the planet: The Bezos Earth Fund, AI, and carbon offsets

A recent report by Grain highlights the conflicts of interest and promotion of carbon offsets in the Bezos Earth Fund.

In 2020, Jeff Bezos announced that he would be handing out US$10 billion over 10 years through a new foundation: the Bezos Earth Fund. This was, “the largest philanthropic commitment ever to fight climate change and protect nature”, according to the Fund’s website.

A recent report by Grain argues that Bezos’ billions are a “gift to Amazon”. While Bezos is no longer CEO of Amazon, he is the largest shareholder in Amazon. He is executive chair of both Amazon and the Bezos Earth Fund. Bezos’ new wife, Lauren Sánchez, is vice-president of the Bezos Earth Fund.

In July 2025, Bezos appointed Tom Taylor as president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. Taylor was a senior vice president at Amazon where he worked on Alexa and AI. He has no experience in either philanthropy or environmental issues.

Grain notes that it’s not just the revolving door between Amazon and Bezos Earth Fund, that is problematic:

There is also an overlap in agendas, especially in the contentious work they are both doing to promote and develop markets for carbon offsets.

In 2019, Amazon set a target of reaching “net zero” carbon emissions by 2040. But like the other Big Tech companies, since then Amazon has been going in the opposite direction. Between 2018 and 2024, Amazon’s emissions increased by 53.6% largely because of AI. Amazon is by far the worst climate polluter of the Big Tech corporations.

Predictably enough, Amazon’s “solution” to reaching “net zero” is to buy carbon credits, mainly generated from tree planting or protecting forests. Grain points out that “Carbon offsets are a dangerous distraction from actual emissions reductions.”

Big Tech corporations are increasingly buying carbon offsets in order to deflect criticism of their massive increase in greenhouse gas emissions generated by their AI data centres. This is also fuelling a land grab as more and more land is taken for carbon projects, particularly in the Global South.

In 2024, Amazon was one of the companies that announced a US$180 million deal with the LEAF Coalition to buy carbon credits from the state of Pará in Brazil.

Brazilian federal prosecutors have started a legal case against the deal and the carbon project faces opposition from Indigenous Peoples and quilombola communities.

Grain explains that as well as buying carbon credits, Amazon has set up its own carbon certification standard for tree planting projects. It has also set up a carbon credit trading platform where its suppliers and customers can buy carbon credits. Carbon Market Watch writes that,

Rather than encourage corporations to accelerate real and durable emissions cuts, the online behemoth decided to rebrand old carbon crediting practices and repackage them in a shiny new box.

Jamey Mulligan is head of carbon offsetting at Amazon. Speaking at a World Resources Institute event in November 2022, he said that while jurisdictional REDD will be the focus for a large part of the carbon market for the next decade, “when that phases out, by 2040, I expect that the largest section of the carbon market will be from tree-based restoration, nature-based carbon removal”.

Mulligan spoke about “hundreds of millions of hectares of formerly forested pasture. The opportunity is immense, you can tackle it ways that are consistent with food security”. What he didn’t mention is the scale of the land grab required to offset Amazon’s ever-increasing carbon footprint.

Amazon and the Science-Based Targets initiative

Andrew Steer was the Bezos Earth Fund’s first CEO. Before that he worked at the World Resources Institute and before that he was at the World Bank. Steer has spent much of his career promoting carbon trading.

The Bezos Earth Fund was a core funder of the Science-Based Targets initiative and in 2024 it played a key role in an attempt to get SBTi to accept carbon offsets as a way for companies to meet their net zero targets. The SBTi did not bend to the Bezos Earth Fund’s pressure.

A year previously, SBTi dropped Amazon from its list of validated companies after failing to agree on a meaningful carbon emissions goal. And in December 2024, the Bezos Earth Fund stopped funding SBTi.

Andrew Steer left the Bezos Earth Fund two months later. He told the podcast Cleaning Up that the Fund had handed out US$2.5 billion in part aimed at making climate organisations more “professional”. “There’s still a pretty strong legacy in some mainstream environmental organisations against capitalism,” Steer said. “Quite frankly there’s a suspicion against the market.”

The Bezos Earth Fund is one of the largest donors to the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market. It funds the World Resources Institute, which sits on the board of the ICVCM.

The Land & Carbon Lab, Meta, and carbon markets

The Bezos Earth Fund set up the Land & Carbon Lab with the World Resources Institute, in collaboration with Meta. The Land & Carbon Lab uses AI and satellite data to map and monitor all sources and sinks of greenhouse gases from the land sector globally.

TerraFund for AFR100 is also funded by the Bezos Earth Fund. AFR100 is the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, which has a target of “restoring” 100 million hectares of land by 2030. A 2020 paper in Trends in Ecology & Evolution argues that the tree planting programme is based on a “profound misreading of Africa’s grassy biomes”. The authors write that,

The global scale of tree planting promoted by AFR100 and similar programmes ignores local concerns over land tenure, competition with agriculture, and conservation, and imposes this single dominant land use for generations to come.

Grain notes that while not all of AFR100 projects involve carbon credits, all the projects will be used to feed data into the Land & Carbon Lab for its satellite monitoring and satellite system.

In January 2025, the Land & Carbon Lab and Meta released an AI-powered map that allows monitoring planting and growth of trees in carbon projects. It can then estimate how much carbon these trees are storing.

The Land & Carbon Lab writes that,

This new high-resolution data sets a baseline for remotely monitoring changes at the level of individual trees, making it a critical advancement for measuring land use emissions and tracking progress on conservation and restoration projects, which are essential for achieving the world’s goals for climate, nature and people.

Meanwhile Meta writes that,

Forest-based carbon removal and the use of technology to better monitor, report, and verify the carbon sequestration is an essential component of Meta’s carbon removal strategy.

What’s clear is that the Land & Carbon Lab is using the data from AFR100 and elsewhere to feed into its AI systems, in order to further promote carbon trading.

Grain concludes that, “Bezos is in control of a US$2.4 trillion company and a US$10 billion foundation that are completely aligned in their efforts to develop and legitimise carbon offset markets as a solution to the climate crisis.”