The world’s richest man has given up on Earth. Developed economies are scrambling to cut emissions, and globally governments are being urged to declare a climate emergency, but Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, seems to have thrown in the towel already.
Yesterday, Blue Origin – the rocket company funded by Bezos to the tune of more than $1 billion (£768 million) a year – announced the Blue Moon lunar lander, the first step in a long project to build up infrastructure in space, and make humans an interplanetary species.
Bezos is convinced we’re going to run out of resources, no matter how much conservation takes place. He sees a bleak world of energy rationing in the not so distant future. “That’s the path that we would be on,” he said yesterday. “It would lead for the first time to where your children and grandchildren have worse lives than you. That's a bad path.”
That might explain his company’s attitude to climate change – if the crisis is inevitable, why bother fighting it? Amazon lags behind the other tech giants on sustainability. In 2014, it made a belated pledge – two years after Apple and Facebook – to run all of its data centres on renewables, but that seems to have stalled. A Greenpeace report estimates only 12 per cent of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in Virginia, where most of them are located, are running on clean energy.
Amazon, on the other hand, insists that since 2018 its data centres have exceeded "50 per cent renewable energy usage" but there are a few different ways of measuring renewable energy usage, and the firm may be taking a particularly generous definition of the term to stand up these claims. In any case, Amazon's lack of clear reporting around its climate impact make it tricky for anyone to really work out how green it really is.
Last year, the company announced plans to run its own delivery services. But unlike FedEx and UPS, which are slowly electrifying their fleets, Amazon ordered 20,000 diesel vans. And, perhaps most damningly of all, the company has aggressively courted clients in the fossil fuel industry, pursuing partnerships with the likes of Shell and BP to provide data services (including one called Amazon Glacier) to oil fields. A page on the AWS website describes how Amazon can help fossil fuel companies “find oil faster,” “recover more oil” and “reduce the cost per barrel”.
Read more: Hey Elon Musk, shut the hell up about colonising Mars
It’s about priorities. Amazon has pledged to make half of its deliveries carbon neutral by 2030, 11 years from now. In contrast, Bezos says it will take just five years for Blue Origin to put humans back on the moon.
The Blue Moon lander is ostensibly the first part of a long plan to save the Earth by shifting humans off it. It’s a cargo vessel, powered by liquid hydrogen and capable of ferrying several tons of material to and from the lunar surface.
While rival space billionaire (and what an era we’re in that this is now a legitimate phrase) Elon Musk wants to colonise Mars, Bezos is keen on artificial worlds known as O’Neill cylinders, after physicist Gerard O’Neill, who he crossed paths with while a student at Princeton.
These are free-floating artificial habitats built from material harvested from asteroids and powered by solar energy. They could be home for up a to a million people each. Lush illustrations from Bezos’ presentation show brushed steel cityscapes, Tuscan-inspired terracotta towns, and a lone stag surveying a craggy landscape of forests and waterfalls. The Earth is a forgotten marble in the background. “This is Maui on its best day all year long,” Bezos said. “No rain. No earthquakes. People are going to want to live here.” He stopped short of promising free same-day delivery.
The initial focus on the Moon is partly due to a pledge by Donald Trump – in keeping with his record of doing exactly what you’d expect a 10-year-old to do if elected president – to return to Earth’s satellite by 2024 “by any means necessary.”
Enlisting the help of a private company such as Blue Origin may well prove a cheaper way for the US government to achieve this goal, but it means that the benefits – all the science and technology innovations – won’t trickle down to the rest of society as they do with Nasa.
The Apollo programme brought us smoke detectors, satellite televisions and modern microchips. A Blue Origin trip to the moon might help your Amazon delivery drone land without tearing up the driveway.
Bezos talks about democratising space, and creating the infrastructure that will open it up to smaller companies. He frames Blue Origin's plans as a way to save the Earth. But it looks like the Blue Moon lander’s first mission will be aimed at the satellite’s south pole, where there’s water ice that can be turned into fuel. It’s a harvest job.
Amazon is already sacrificing the climate at the altar of convenience. Blue Origin wants to asset-strip the moon to build refuges for the rich, and it’s paying for them by destroying the Earth. It’s impossible to calculate how much life in a climate-controlled floating cylinder will cost, but it won’t be £7.99 a month with a free 30 day trial. “There is no Plan B,” said Bezos in his presentation yesterday. Not for the rest of us, anyway.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
