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Comment by an_opabinia | Hacker News Reader

Suppose the investments turn out to be wildly successful. They turn $2b into $200b. They could still fail at the goal of slowing global warming.

The accounting value of an equity, especially a growth stage company, is never the same as its economic value. When in history has accounting (like a price) measured something real / believable about the environment?

One way to look at this is what is the environmental impact of Tesla? Amazon would have love to have invested in Tesla. That would have made this fund. Anyone would. But just because their accounting values goes up so and so, doesn't mean that's a measurement of their environmental impact.

My point is, equities are ill suited incentives for even economic profits, let alone environmental "profits."

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> My point is, equities are ill suited incentives for even economic profits, let alone environmental "profits."

What is your alternative proposal?

It's not like Amazon's $2B investment in climate tech is mutually exclusive with government initiatives or other climate research. It's another angle to approach the problem, using the tools they have at their disposal. I don't understand the desire to assume the most cynical takes on this initiative.

> I don't understand the desire to assume the most cynical takes on this initiative.

Because of Amazon's (poor) history when it comes to exercising corporate social responsibility?

They could pay taxes and we could, as a nation, decide how best to coordinate efforts to fight climate change.

> They could pay taxes

It's false to claim that Amazon doesn't pay their taxes. Amazon pays taxes on profits according to the tax law, just like every other company. Amazon employees pay taxes on their paychecks, just like every other company's employees. Amazon's customers pay taxes on their purchases, just like customers of every other company's customers. Amazon generates a lot of tax revenue.

> and we could, as a nation, decide how best to coordinate efforts to fight climate change

Like I said: Amazon's climate change actions are not mutually exclusive with government initiatives to combat climate change.

It's a false dichotomy, not to mention specious argument, to suggest that Amazon's $2B investment in climate change is somehow preventing the government from also investing in climate change intitiatives.

I don't trust the nation to coordinate tying shoes much less fighting climate change. Our federal system is broken and our populace is generally ignorant on scientific matters relying on it to bring sweeping changes at this point in time would be a critical misstep.

I think the best think individuals can do at the moment is vote to bring in new blood on both sides of the aisle, subsequently vote reform on local levels and for education reform then wait a decade or two and then vote to reform our federal systems.

In the meantime backing long term thinking companies and boycotting bad acting companies because the private sector is going to have to shoulder the fight until we fix the government. In the meantime

Are you implying that Amazon is not paying the taxes they're legally required to?

If not, then I don't think the problem is solved by saying they "could pay taxes" since they already are, but rather that the government could be levying more taxes on businesses like Amazon.

This is an odd position to take given that, as a nation, we have failed spectacularly to address climate change in any way whatsoever. Will Amazon paying more in taxes substantially change the political economy of climate legislation somehow?

Don't invest, subsidize, and expect no investment return (the return is climate change is mitigated). More DARPA, less VC fund. Identify critical technologies needed to rapidly decarbonize transportation, the supply chain, and the electrical grid, and directly subsidize them if they are not yet cost competitive with fossil use. Capitalism primitives (in this case, equity investment) are not always optimal tools for engineering solutions. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has saved >100 million lives by donating vaccines to the developing world. Donations, not investment.

Also a path to consider is lobbying and political activism. If Amazon has aligned itself with driving carbon out of the economy (their historical PPA efforts and this fund seems to communicate such a stance), they should be using their dollars to support political representation that will codify this into law (more aggressive subsidies for low carbon technologies & mobility electrification, and implementation of a carbon tax).

> What is your alternative proposal?

According to the "The Largest Public Statement of Economists in History": a carbon tax and dividend [0].

The technology of markets is one of price signals and feedback loops, generally on time horizons between nano-second HFTs and quarterly earnings reports. Ecological events, occurring on the scale of decades or centuries, require governments (or other forms of collective action) to create artificial price signals for those externalities.

At any rate, I agree that there's nothing wrong with this initiative. Every bit potentially helps; I don't see this diverting resources from other efforts.

[0] https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/

> At any rate, I completely agree that there's nothing wrong with this initiative. Every bit potentially helps; I don't see this diverting resources from other efforts.

That was the point I was trying to make. Amazon's $2B investment isn't mutually exclusive with government efforts to combat climate change. It's additive.

The knee-jerk reactions to Amazon's climate initiatives from the HN comments are disappointing.

Yes, I agree. There are arguably some corporate initiatives that are trivial PR stunts, or attempts to pre-empt government intervention; but $2B is a big chunk of change, and this doesn't seem like either.

From Amazon's perspective, this a good move (and I'm sure as much in the interests of their bottom line as long-term planetary altruism). But from a citizen's perspective, we shouldn't rest on our laurels and assume that corporations and private investment will solve the problem on their own.

The tax & divided definitely seems like an ideal solution, but we can't waste another twenty years trying to convince voters to institute it. Carbon tax & dividend proposals have gone nowhere for twenty years now. Even in Washington, the latest attempt lost by almost 70% against.

Right, and more to the point the point of a carbon tax is to incentive the private sector to decarbonize which will require capital investments in clean tech. The problem isn't going to be solved by everyone reducing their carbon footprint by 10%. Everyone has to reduce their carbon footprint to zero and then we most likely still need to be pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Tax & Dividend isn't necessarily the fastest-acting policy in the world, and I'm keenly aware that we're on a clock; indeed, it seems exceptionally likely we're already beyond an inflection point, and will need something akin to geo-engineering in addition to however we reduce new carbon emissions.

I think a concerted PR effort could move the needle on popularity relatively quickly (which isn't unprecedented on other policy issues: opinions on gay marriage and marijuana legalization both tipped relatively quickly). The fact that it's market-based and doesn't expand government bureaucracy helps sell it to the right, the fact that most working people would come ahead economically helps sell it to the left. But absent that: do you have a better policy solution in mind that is more politically viable? I think the Green New Deal is a pretty good idea, at least in the abstract, but without a major sea change it seems to be DOA as well.

Unfortunately even if we can get everyone to agree that a carbon tax should be implemented, no one can seem to agree exactly how the revenues should be spent. E.g. a flat dividend isn't progressive enough for portions of the left. It seems that's been the big point of contention.

I don't know what the most realistic policy is at this point. Perhaps some mix of continued subsidy for renewable energy & storage, quiet ongoing research into iron fertilization, and pray that we have the technology ready to ramp when the voting public is finally forced to face reality.

Carbon Engineering is my moonshot hope. If synthetic direct air capture fuel ever becomes cheaper than fossil, it would decarbonize many challenging industries overnight, as well as providing a good launch pad for sequestration. (Continued investment in renewable energy makes this more possible)

> E.g. a flat dividend isn't progressive enough for portions of the left

Huh, that's news to me. Can you point to any prominent left politicians/pundits opining that? Is it just that they prefer Green New Deal? Do they object to the "strange bedfellows" of Frank Luntz & co. (if any Republicans like it, it must be a corporate/neo-fascist plot)?

> Carbon Engineering is my moonshot hope.

Yeah, I think we'll need something like this anyway. But with our current tech, it's still orders of magnitude more efficient to not pull the carbon out of the ground in the first place. (One of my crazier/handwavium ideas: massive fail-safe thorium reactor, hundreds of miles away from any human habitation to avoid NIMBY problems, whose only job is to pull carbon out of the air.)

I can't point to any pundits, it's more like carbon tax & dividend bills meet a lot of argument from leftist groups in the press & popular discussion- we should spend the revenue on climate mitigation. No, it should be directly invested in renewables. No, it should be given only to poor people because they suffer more from climate change. Actually, we've been looking for a source of funds for <unrelated progressive program>...

Ah, interesting. My assumption is that "just give it back to people" would entirely sidestep the question of how to spend the funds, but I suppose it suffers from the https://xkcd.com/927/ problem ;)

Really depends on HOW they are investing IMO.

2B in equities won't really do anything other than raise the stock prices for green technologies.

2B in green bonds or direct funding may help to move the needle if the case is that these companies are cash strapped.

But, IMO, the thing that will actually move the needle more than anything else is if Amazon takes that 2B and actually goes out and builds out renewable sources and replaces their delivery vehicles with EVs. Because, simply investing in a company that does green things doesn't guarantee actual change.

It would be a sizable impact if they powered all their services with renewable sources, especially if they don't fall back on the grid (so building out storage for themselves).

> It would be a sizable impact if they powered all their services with renewable sources, especially if they don't fall back on the grid (so building out storage for themselves).

Google uses Tomorrow's ElectricityMap [1] engine and forecasting to schedule and stage workloads based on clean energy availability [2] [3]. I am curious if Amazon would consider doing the same for themselves (and tangentially related, Microsoft as well), but also expose AWS clients to pricing signals to shift client workloads to "cleaner" locations. It would be carbon tax of sorts, but mandated by technology providers instead of government.

For example, if you were so inclined, you'd want to run your workloads during the day in AWS' west coast datacenters (as California generates an enormous amount of energy during the day from solar, and electricity in the PNW is primarily hydro), or Texas when there's a large amount of wind power on the ERCOT grid. You would not want to run your workloads anywhere where coal and natural gas were the primary sources of power.

[1] https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=...

[2] https://www.tmrow.com/blog/announcing-our-partnership-with-g...

[3] https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-center...

> But, IMO, the thing that will actually move the needle more than anything else is if Amazon takes that 2B and actually goes out and builds out renewable sources and replaces their delivery vehicles with EVs.

Even better, they're doing that outside of the 2B fund.

Amazon is creating a futuristic fleet of 100,000 electric delivery vans https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-creating-fleet-of-ele...

AWS is committed to achieving 100% renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/

It looks good on an annual report though.

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