Where should Bezos spend his $10 billion?

Locking up CO2, stabilising permafrost and the dolphin dividend: that, say our mega experts, is where the Amazon founder should spend his billions.

Cameron Hepburn portrait

Cameron Hepburn

For Bezos to have maximum impact he will have to focus on technologies where relatively modest improvements are likely have outsized effects. That’s because even though $10 billion is a huge amount for an individual to donate, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the trillion dollars and more needed each year to shift the global economy from fossil fuels to clean technologies. For instance, it will not take a huge improvement in batteries for electric vehicles to leapfrog the convenience and versatility of traditionally-powered cars. Alternatively, Bezos could invest in emergent carbon capture and storage technologies that could lock CO2 up in cement or other products, or capture and store CO2 through reforestation and ecosystem restoration – his funds could be leveraged by making investments in these areas more attractive to other private capital. 

Chris Goodall portrait

Chris Goodall

If we could capture CO2 from the air - not just from concentrated streams of flue gas - for less than $100 a tonne, we would have probably have solved the climate change problem. Carbon dioxide this cheap would enable us to achieve two things; first, to make synthetic replacements for oil and other hydrocarbons at a price competitive with fossil equivalents and, second to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere without ruining the world economy. Bezos’s money should be invested in research and development to achieve these aims. His fellow philanthropist Bill Gates has already backed one of the two most important existing commercial competitors in direct air capture of CO2 and Bezos should concentrate on fundamental research on the chemistry of CO2 absorption and on how we can cost competitively store all the CO2 we need to permanently remove from the air.

Vaclav Smil portrait

Vaclav Smil

What amount of environmental salvation will $10 billion buy? Just calculate along with me, as we can estimate the potential impact by looking at the cost of Germany’s Energiewende. Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie puts it at $323 billion between 2000 and 2019. In the year 2000 (using BP conversions) Germany burned about 292 million tons of oil equivalent (toe) of fossil fuels, in 2019 it was still about 250 million toe. Reducing the country’s carbon combustion by 42 million toe cost about $7,700 per toe of eliminated fossil carbon. 
If we assume that the Bezos’s money will be spent as brilliantly as it has been by Energiewende, then $10 billion would lower the global consumption of fossil carbon by about 1.3 million toe. Worldwide combustion of fossil fuels is now about 11.7 billion toe, so the gift might lower it by 0.01%! Assuming, of course, that 40 per cent of it will not go for overhead claimed by a bureaucracy set up to disburse it. 

Leo Johnson portrait

Leo Johnson

What’s the first thing I would want Jeff Bezos to fund? Stabilising the permafrost around Russia’s Lake Baikal. In October 2019, a research expedition of 70 scientists came across a patch of bubbling water, with plumes of methane gas leaking out of the permafrost at concentrations 6-7 higher than normal. Why does this matter? Locked beneath Baikal’s ice there is an estimated 424 Gigatonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas that, over 20 years, is an estimated 80 times more powerful than CO2. In the 2014 words of the climate scientist Professor Jason Box “If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released in the atmosphere, we are fxxxxx.” It looks like it is starting to happen.
Stabilising the methane is no easy task; as well as melting ice, another long-term risk is that decreasing water levels in the lake reduce the pressure that keeps the gas down. Water levels have already dropped and China is now proposing a 2000 km pipeline to divert water from the lake to Lanzhou in Northwest China.
Is there a glimmer of hope on stabilising the ice? One short term answer may come in the form of a relatively low tech solution. Use a satellite network to detect just where the ice is melting (and methane has a distinctive glitter that already allows AI to pick up its signature trace relatively easily in oil fields). Then once you’ve located the leaks, with the points of vulnerability initially believed to be limited to the edges of the lake, put in place a network of thermosyphons (the ground source heat pumps used all over the Arctic in construction) to suck out excess heat and stabilise the permafrost layer. In terms of return on investment this would be my first bet. 424 Gigatonnes is a lot of methane.

Stuart Orr

Stuart Orr

What if Jeff Bezos loved Amazon Dolphins?
The science is clear: we can meet global climate and energy goals without damming the world’s remaining free flowing rivers and sacrificing all the diverse benefits they provide to people and nature. But with many countries stuck in a 20th century mindset, unnecessary and increasingly risky hydropower dams loom over most of these rivers. Jeff Bezos should disrupt these destructive plans by investing his $10 billion in truly green, renewable energy projects – such as solar and wind – in the Amazon, Balkans, Irrawaddy, Mara and Mekong. His transformational investments would provide the desired power, while safeguarding these rivers as well as the fisheries, farms, businesses, cities, deltas, and biodiversity (yes – including river dolphins) they sustain. Bezos’ billions would also send a clear message around the globe: healthy rivers and wetlands must be protected because they are the best defence against the climate impacts heading our way – impacts that will “most immediately and acutely be felt through water”. And they would cause a flood of other public and private finance to follow in his wake.
And with his ‘dolphin dividend’ – since his vast investments would produce returns – Bezos could fund the removal of obsolete dams to restore flow and life to other rivers, which would further boost global efforts to build more resilient societies, economies and ecosystems.