The influence of Amazon and Jeff Bezos’s $10bn charitable group over the carbon credit market is raising alarm, in a growing battle over how Big Tech and corporate groups seek to achieve tough climate goals.
The Bezos Earth Fund is among the largest funders of the Science Based Targets initiative, a globally-renowned body relied upon by groups such as Apple and H&M to set voluntary standards and strict limits on the use of carbon credits to offset emissions.
Separately, Amazon is expanding its own voluntary pledging initiative, signed by more than 500 companies including Uber, IBM and Microsoft, which could provide an alternative way to hit climate goals and which has no limit on the use of carbon credits.
The SBTi is also in the middle of a process of rethinking its approach to offsets, a decision that could prove crucial to Big Tech groups at a time when artificial intelligence is resulting in a leap in emissions caused by the greater use of data centres.
Experts and campaigners have grown concerned about the potential of Amazon and the Bezos fund, whose chair and vice-chair are Bezos and his fiancée Lauren Sánchez, to influence SBTi, which holds sway over whether many corporate groups can achieve a credible “net zero” label.
A person close to Amazon said that it was an “entirely different” company to the Bezos fund: “We operate independently from one another.”
But a former SBTi staff member raised fears about perceived influence of the Bezos fund on climate standards in a July complaint to the UK charity commission. The fund has also financed the organisations that employ three SBTi board members.
The charity commission planned last week to advise SBTi, a UK-registered charity, on how to make improvements to its governance, including on conflicts of interest, according to correspondence seen by the Financial Times.
The Bezos Earth Fund said it “looks forward reading the findings of the UK Charity Commission”. SBTi said: “We have clear governance processes in place, including a conflict of interest statement, and continue to take proactive steps to improve these mechanisms.”
Grant-making organisations with current or historic ties to big business, such as Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Ikea Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation are the financial bedrock of the climate standard setting and campaigning space. Google and its philanthropic arm have also funded bodies in this space.
But the battle over the future of the SBTi could prove crucial to corporate efforts to achieve climate goals. Some companies have become frustrated at SBTi’s restrictions on the use of credits to just 10 per cent of emissions. Over the past year, Amazon and Microsoft were among the hundreds of companies removed from its list of groups taking ambitious enough steps to hit “net zero”.
The Bezos fund is also a backer of the top standard setter in carbon accounting: the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which is also in the process of reconsidering its approach to offsets.
A job description posted earlier this week for the Climate and Nature Finance Collaborative, which the Bezos fund co-founded, sought a staff member who could build strategies “in support of the voluntary carbon market”, currently worth about $1bn.
Amazon is also seen as promoting alternatives to the SBTi’s standards. Companies who choose to sign its Climate Pledge must promise to hit “net zero” by 2040, “in line” with the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, but can choose exactly how far this means cutting their own emissions versus buying offsets. Amazon last year also contributed to the creation of a market label, Abacus, to test the quality of carbon credits.
Amazon said: “Through our Climate Pledge, we’ll continue to drive our net-zero emissions path forward, invest and innovate in climate solutions, and deliver for our customers, partners, and the planet.”
“If big polluters like Amazon want to reach net zero as cheaply as possible, they may well have an incentive to engineer a situation where offsets are seen as credible,” said Holger Hoffman-Riem, a member of SBTI’s technical advisory group, and a consultant at Swiss non-profit Go For Impact.
“And if Bezos funds so much of the climate standards space then Amazon could be in a position where it can influence decisions taken in that space.”
Buying credits is typically much cheaper than cutting supply chain emissions, making them a tool of choice for some chief executives in the face of pressure to keep climate promises made to shareholders.
Carbon credits represent a tonne of CO₂ removed or saved, for example when trees are protected or when coal is replaced with renewable energy, but their benefits are difficult to quantify. Energy credits are meant to represent new renewable energy and are used in a similar way to offset emissions.
SBTi insiders expressed concern about a “Hydra” of carbon and energy credit lobbyists at meetings on climate policy. A person close to the Bezos fund hit back against this criticism: “They cannot stand the fact that they no longer have a carte blanche to set the rules . . . Welcome to a grown up world of standard setting.”
Amazon is the only company to have funded SBTI’s core work, although is no longer a current financial backer. Lafarge, ArcelorMittal, Danone and Ikea have funded specific projects.
In one intervention two and a half years ago, the fund’s chief Andrew Steer asked for SBTi’s board and management to meet a group of big US-listed companies: Amazon, Netflix, General Motors and Johnson Controls.
Steer expressed the companies’ frustration at SBTi’s “lack of flexibility”, including its rules limiting the use of carbon credits, according to a 2022 email seen by the FT and first reported by Die Zeit.
A meeting with the SBTi management and board would go a long way by “showing this kind of respect” and could head off a push to set up an alternative standard-setting body, Steer wrote. He referenced the “large financial injection” made by the Bezos fund to assist the standard-setter.
SBTi said its engagement with companies globally were “entirely appropriate”.
Two years later, in March, the Bezos fund backed a watering down in SBTi’s rules on carbon credits at a meeting it had called, the FT previously reported. A person close to the fund said credits had not been on the agenda and the fund had not promoted the use of credits at the meeting.
Shortly after, SBTi’s board said it would allow the use of carbon credits at scale. It was later forced to row back after the move prompted staff complaints. Its chief executive Luiz Amaral resigned in July, citing “personal reasons”. Amaral had joined SBTi in 2022 after working under Steer at another climate group.
“Everything we do at the Bezos Earth Fund is done exclusively for the benefit of the public good,” the fund said. Steer’s email “only demonstrates that we care to pass crucial information to our grantees in support of their success”.
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