The new report from GRAIN shows how IT corporations like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are turning to carbon markets to hide their ballooning greenhouse gas emissions, caused in large part by the industry’s push for increasing use of energy-heavy AI and cloud computing. GRAIN’s research looks at how in particular Amazon and the USD 10 billion Bezos Earth Fund set up by Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos don’t stop at just buying carbon credits. Both are involved in creating the infrastructure to produce carbon credits. Amazon has established its own carbon credit certification standard for tree planting projects, and carbon credit trading platform where its suppliers can buy Amazon-certified carbon credits. The Bezos Fund has set up the Land & Carbon Lab which is building up its capacity for satellite monitoring and verification through a major tree planting initiative in Africa that is also funded by the Bezos fund. “Already there’s a boom in such projects across the global South”, GRAIN points out, “and this is driving land grabs and violent conflicts. Yet, to get to the kind of scale that can make a significant dent in Amazon’s emissions tally, the company would need way more of these projects, involving millions more hectares of land.”
The new report from GRAIN shows how IT corporations like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are turning to carbon markets to hide their ballooning greenhouse gas emissions, caused in large part by the industry’s push for increasing use of energy-heavy AI and cloud computing. GRAIN’s research looks at how in particular Amazon and the USD 10 billion Bezos Earth Fund set up by Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos don’t stop at just buying carbon credits. Both are involved in creating the infrastructure to produce carbon credits.