Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on the planet, and who started his financial empire by selling books online, pledged $2 billion to restoring natural habitats and transforming food systems at the climate summit in Glasgow on Tuesday.

Speaking at a conference where President Biden and other leaders announced a global pact to end deforestation by 2030, Bezos said that private industry must play a central role in the campaign.

“Amazon aims to power all its operations by renewable energies by 2025,” he said, restating his goal for the company to be carbon-neutral by 2040.

That will be a sizeable challenge.

Amazon said, for example, that the company’s emissions from indirect sources had increased 15 per cent last year over 2019.

The company has pointed out that when its emissions are measured relative to its booming sales, its carbon footprint has been decreasing.

But some climate experts say this calculation, called carbon intensity, obscures that the company is still generating an increasing amount of carbon.

“The planet doesn’t care about carbon intensity,” said Roland Geyer, a professor of industrial ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The climate is being hurt by absolute emissions.”

The actions taken by Amazon came after pressure from employees for the company to step up its efforts in addressing climate change. That has included calls that the company stop offering custom cloud-computing services that help the oil and gas industry find and extract fossil fuels.

New York Times News Service