CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Vampire Planet: Hey DiCaprio, Bezos Ain’t Our Friend

Amazon AWS data center, image Wikipedia.

Most would agree that the animals suffering as the world burns need our help. So Jeff Bezos and Leonardo DiCaprio’s $200 million commitment to the Phoenix Species Project to revive 100 endangered species around the world should be welcome news.

“I could not be prouder to announce this,” DiCaprio wrote joyously in an Instagram post. “Save these species, and we protect everything around them. The forests, the rivers, and the climate itself.”

I sincerely hope that’s true and that these creatures, including a lemur in Madagascar, a pink iguana in the Galápagos, a pancake tortoise in Tanzania, see tangible benefits from conservation efforts.

Yet I can’t help but sense a perversity in all of this. 

The initiative is being funded with Bezos’s blood money, as was his 2020 launch of the $10 billion greenwashed Earth Fund. All the cash Bezos is throwing at the environment is nowhere near enough to offset the damage caused by the creation of his obscene wealth, which places him in the top three richest people on the planet. Amazon, the company that made him all that money, is one of the world’s largest corporate climate polluters.

Even under the company’s own accounting........

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