Bezos Earth Fund Grants $400M for Greening Underserved Urban U.S. Communities
bezosearthfund.org
bezosearthfund.org
> Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities [committed by one’s enemies] in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred.
Bezos is a complicated figure, and there are other causes that could also use money, but this appears to be an inarguably good thing, so let's take the win.
I do wonder exactly what the theory of change here is - this is a huge amount of money, and I am surprised it's a great way to spend it, especially when the Inflation Reduction Act just authorized so much money for similar goals. I didn't dig into the individual grants, though the ones I peeked at didn't get too specific on what that work is.
Parks, trees, and community gardens are all great. My general expectation in my experience is that poor urban communities are disproportionately often in park-heavy areas (not for justice reasons, for floodplain reasons). I guess they need work to make them better? I like community gardens, but I am just shocked if folks are helping much to solve anything that matters by dedicating dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars to promoting them.
I am extremely skeptical that the climate mitigations cited are very well-accomplished by the green spaces mentioned. It's obligatory to cite climate change in everything, which gets frustrating, especially because we are engaged in so few of the things that would actually help.
We do know that trees generally reduce the heat island effect because of evaporation, and that they improve air quality.
This is ironic given that Atlanta currently has 85 acres of prime greenspace that the city is spending $90M+ to turn into a police training center:
I don’t know Bezos or Amazon’s stance on cops but I do know that corporations loooooove police - it’s where cops came from. I wouldn’t be surprised if this infusion is specifically to detract from the bad press of Cop City.
Oh wait, I do know Amazon’s stance - I was lying, you see. Amazon, via Ring, has really cozied up to law enforcement. The terms of what they can and can’t do with your data have gotten looser and looser when it comes to sharing data with LE, and this includes the Neighborhood app or whatever. Crime on your street? Ring can hand over all recording data from that time from the cameras on your street without the owner’s consent.
So, given this, I’d be very curious to know how much influence this will have on City (sorry about the emoji, I have an auto replace and got tired of “fixing” it). I’d also be curious to know if similar Urban Warfare centers are planned on the other four locations, as the one in Atlanta is certainly being watched closely by other departments looking to get in on the action (and tax dollars!) of simulating high speed chases and no knock raids!
The idea there being that OP said it was ironic, and my guess is that it’s less ironic and more intentional.
>...Once complete, the center is planned to be used as a training center for police and fire services and is expected to open at the end of 2023....
>265 surrounding acres of the site will be used as green-space.[6]
265 acres of green space sounds good?
You mean the not prime green space that was a prison farm and illegal waste dump site for seven decades?
It's an okish natural area right now, but it's hardly pristine wildlife, and while I'm not a huge fan of the APD - I don't think that removing training opportunities (and potential revenue from surrounding areas that use the facilities) is really the right solution.
For context - I've been in Atlanta 34 years, and live in South Atlanta now.
Frankly, I don't understand the "cop city" drama. It feels entirely manufactured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Corporation_of_New_Yo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation
And now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Philanthropy (not significant enough yet to warrant it's own page)
A classic move by exploitative billionaires to launder their legacy. But what's the alternative? NOT doing it? We should support it, and shame the billionaires that DON'T. do this.
Taxing the crap out of them in some way that passes constitutional muster, and if necessary changing the constitution?
So he should have donated 1 billion? why not 2? why not 5? why not 10? well hang on, 10 billion for greening some areas? That's not an optimal use of 10 billion. 8 of those should go to doctors without borders. wait hang on, have you seen the ukrainian refugee crisis? and you're putting 8 billion towards doctors without borders? they should get at least 3 of that. wow so you've donated 10 billion dollars but not a single dollar towards educating women in third world countries? etc ad nauseum.
I guess your take is probably that it's his responsibility to donate 100% of his wealth optimally across the world, and spend the rest of his life doing that. but i'm appealing to people with more sense when I say: don't underestimate how difficult it is to "correctly" spend a large amount of wealth.
I'm not saying we need to like, bow down and praise Bezos over this, or that it erases any other bad things he may have done...but let's try to acknowledge that hundreds of millions toward this kind of charity is an actual good thing and not just a pointless PR stunt.
(Context note: NYS 'jobs for tax cuts' program may be the most aggressive in the nation? I'm not an expert.)
[1]: https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/?state=New+York
Nor does it make this donation somehow responsible for stopping those other good things from happening.
I bet they can make some nice parks for $400M. According to Wikipedia, Disneyland cost $130M adjusted to 2021 dollars. 3 Disneylands isn’t nothing.
I'd like to compare this $400M action to the effort AMZN has spent on paving the planet. ('Making a dent', one might say)
https://www.constructiondive.com/news/amazon-breaks-ground-o...
To upquote Carlin: They are black. They are poor. They are hungry. They live in bad neighborhoods. They have arees have a substantial problem with crime. and often with drugs.
They need money, food, opportunity, education and jobs that pay a living wage.
Bezos being part of the 0.01% (?) super rich elite, lounges in his luxury ivory tower and thinks well "well what the negros need are trees and grass that will make it all so much better"
No, What Bezo needs to do is start paying his workers a living wage, full health insurance, allow them to unionize. give their kids a better chance at higher education.
Stop treating the workers and slave automatons that go to the bathroom far too often and get hurt on the job far too often.
As long as Bezo derives his wealth in part because of his exploitation of "Underserved urban U.S. workers" he is despicable no matter how many feet of grass or trees he is sponsoring out of the petty cash drawer.
This is beyond ridiculous. Rare is a comment that can offend people from all backgrounds, but here it is. Flagged.
...but if you ask someone that is really struggling I doubt their answer as to what they need is "more trees outside my door".
From my admittedly ignorant and priviledged position the answer is more likely to be "I can't apply to jobs if i don't have internet".
With people that have their back against the wall you have to address the showstopper issues. That's not to say they don't deserve trees, but given finite resources, prioritize.
Turns out that poor people have diverse needs and desires, some of which is access to clean green spaces.
Part of the problem that things like this fix is "catastrophic paralysis" where you get stuck trying to find the single most advantageous thing you can do, which often ends up being subsumed into converting money into political blathering.
Whereas if you spend $400m to plant trees, you get trees (or, sadly, you get trees that die instantly because you didn't manage the project at all to verify that the trees will do something, and instead burnt it on a tree planting company that doesn't care if they survive).
Indeed. As I said I'm not denying said needs, but simply suggesting prioritizing more existential ones.
poor people have a lot of existential needs, but providing food, housing, or health care tends to draw out the people who think that's a bad thing.
In urban areas, poor people are the most likely to lack air conditioning. Trees provide shade, preventing absorbent materials below like concrete and asphalt from absorbing heat and baking; and they also evaporate water, cooling the air.
As the climate continues to change, a lot of places will become more susceptible to heat-related death. Trees are a fairly uncontroversial way to mitigate at least some of that; some estimates have the cooling effect as high as 12 C. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2298675-trees-cool-the-...
Trees are one of those things we know have some impact on quality of life, whether they're mental health benefits from spending time in nature, or temperature impacts in urban areas (poorer neighborhoods have less vegetation, and therefore locally get hotter due to so called "heat islands")... but obviously people here don't care about trees because they're much further down on the hierarchy of needs than the wealthy. When you're worried about making rent you don't have time for trees.
So someone like Bezos sees a high-profile pat-on-the-back environmental project... which conveniently fulfills the "I know what you need better than you do" mentality that the wealthy generally hold over the poor... and tada! poor people get trees.
Agreed - that's precisely my point
https://www.rei.com/action/network/campaign/outdoors-for-all
though I don't see any direct connections.
https://www.propublica.org/article/americas-top-15-earners-a...
His wealth growth of $24.3bn is untaxed through those years, he presumably left those assets in Berkshire Hathaway where he'd personally not generate a tax bill for them. Eventually Buffet, or more likely his inheritors, will sell the Berkshire Hathaway assets, and should pay a monumental tax bill on them.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
This is the part people are bothered by.
Regardless of why, billionaires should never be paying $0 in federal income taxes. Our tax code and the people finding loopholes in it should not do this.
Executives should not be able to be "unpaid" for years because they're getting tax advantaged stock deals.
Nobody should be able to have that much wealth and have a year with no taxes.
If you are the human at the end of the line of ownership that ultimately benefits from assets, you should be charged ordinary income as you extract from those assets.
The only people who should owe $0 in federal taxes are those earning less than a full time minimum wage salary during that tax year, with no exceptions for folks who magically seem to find millions of dollars to spend during a year that they "earned" $0.
> a year with no taxes
These are two very different things, and the former does not imply the latter.
I bet most billionaires couldn't even name half the companies they control, because they're all shell companies for shuffling funds overseas.
Bezos should pay a fair amount of taxes ie. we ought to close loopholes and raise the rates for billionaires
& 2. Bezos should pay a fair amount of taxes ie. by using legal loopholes and lobbying the govt. for lower taxes, he is acting immoraly and should stop doing so
Both of which I believe is what's meant but are harder to make into a pithy slogan
Obviously in some theoretical moral sense billionaires are underpaying. But what's the income level you need to cross before you should willfully avoid tax deductions and ways of avoiding taxes. Now codify that into the law in some way.
I just also think that Bezos in particular is underpaying and screaming into the void at him is fun and ok
If you feel so strongly about giving your money away, nothing stops you from writing a check to your favorite causes.
Why are you avoiding taxes if so?
The corrupt politicians they pay off insert these loopholes, or tax avoidance wouldn't be a thing.
Of all taxes paid, where will the government allocated funds go? Its not like the government is running out of money to not fund this.
Donating directly to the communities removes all this mess and gets money where it needs to go.
This is also one of the problems, that will never be fixed aslong as taxes are kind of negotiable for ones above the citizenship/law and people get distracted by this kind of altruist-washing (which can also be a way to dodge taxes).
> Taxes -> Uncle Sam -> Some Politician Pockets -> Dumbass projects.
The issue you highlight is not taxes per se but the political sphere, which can be solved seperately. Rejecting taxes and not acknowledging the root problem _makes you part of the problem_ and useful for the ones profiting from it.
OT: Its ridiculous, that ppl _who voted for 1 of 2 corrupt parties complain about their stolen votes_. This kind of idiocy could also be a useful product of a failed educational systems maybe combined with Murrica-first delusions.
And I strongly disagree with the premise we should let our capitalist and genetic lottery winners solely determine what problems society needs solving.
At least this way he gets to feel good about it.
Hopefully they don't try to force what would be the correct green for the climate of one place on another. We have too much of that already.
The "bosque" (forest) along the river is a riparian oasis compared to parts of the city 5-8 miles away, and historically was a major agricultural area. This changed somewhat when in the 1940s the bureau of reclamation began damming the river and providing water to other areas.
So while I certainly appreciate your concern, it is easy to overstate the issue (and also easy to ignore it, as has been done in the past).