The transportation model is focused on the critical drivers of carbon, in this case vehicle types, fuel types, and routes. This allows us to analyze our existing networks and logistics and also to understand emerging technologies, emerging vehicles, alternative fuels. We’re now able to model the electronic vehicles (EVs) that are coming, the drones that are coming, the next transportation innovation that will come. Ultimately this allows us to design sustainability into our future typologies, technologies, and customer innovations.

  These metrics, this data, provides insights for teams across Amazon that we otherwise wouldn’t have, including things that may be counterintuitive. Same-day shipping is actually our lowest carbon ship option. This is because getting inventory local to customers is almost always a sustainability win.

  These systems we built—the models, the metrics—are now giving detailed views for teams across Amazon to help them reduce carbon. We are moving from totals to targeted emissions and innovations for Amazon’s customers and the planet.

  We want to be leaders and role models. You know, we’ve been in the middle of the herd on this issue, and we want to move to the forefront. We want to be leaders. We want to say to other companies that if a company of Amazon’s complexity, scale, scope, and physical infrastructure can do this, so can you.

  Today Amazon is at 40 percent renewable energy. We’ve done that by building fifteen utility-scale solar and wind farms. We’ve put rooftop installations on fulfillment centers and sortation centers around the world.

  Where are we going? Well, on renewable energy we have committed to reaching 80 percent renewable energy by 2040. And by 2030 we’re committing to being at 100 percent renewable. The team is pushing to get to 100 percent by 2025 and has a credible plan to pull that off.

  We also have a lot of delivery vans, and they all burn fossil fuels today. In September 2019 we placed an order for one hundred thousand electric delivery vans to be built by a company called Rivian. A pledge like the Climate Pledge will drive the economy to start to build products and services that these large companies need to meet those commitments. This is why we invested $440 million in Rivian.

  We are in partnership with the Nature Conservancy, funding something called the Right Now Climate Fund. We’re contributing $100 million to reforestation. Reforestation is a great example of a nature-based solution for removing carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere.

  As this economy develops and people get serious about being carbon-zero through real changes to their real business activities, that is going to be a gigantic signal to the marketplace to start inventing and developing the new technologies these global companies will need to be able to meet this commitment. And so that’s another reason we have to work together. We need to get a number of companies to sign up for this to really drive that market signal in a strong way. Amazon is large, but if we get lots of large companies to agree to the same thing, that will send an even stronger signal to the market—especially as the supply chains are so interconnected. Collaboration becomes the only way to do it.

  The Bezos Day One Fund

  The Bezos Day One Fund launched in 2018 with a $2 billion commitment to focus on making meaningful and lasting impacts in two areas: funding existing nonprofits that help families experiencing homelessness and creating a network of new, nonprofit tier-one preschools in low-income communities.

  The Day 1 Families Fund issues annual leadership awards to organizations and civic groups doing compassionate, needle-moving work to provide shelter and hunger support to address the immediate needs of young families. The vision statement comes from the inspiring Mary’s Place in Seattle: no child sleeps outside.

  The Day 1 Academies Fund is building an organization to launch and operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities. We will have the opportunity to learn, invent, and improve. And we’ll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The customer set that this team of missionaries will serve is simple: children in underserved communities across the country.

  The remarks below were made at the Economic Club of Washington on September 13, 2018, in a conversation with club president David Rubenstein.

  THE PROCESS I used to create the Day One Fund was very helpful. I solicited ideas, kind of crowdsourced them, and literally received something like forty-seven thousand responses, maybe even a little more. Some came to my inbox. Most came on social media, and I read through thousands and thousands of them. My office correlated them all and put them into buckets, and some themes emerged. A fascinating thing about crowdsourcing is just how long-tailed it is. People are interested in trying to help the world in so many different ways—all involving what you would expect. Some people are very interested in the arts and opera and think they’re underfunded. A lot of people are interested in medicine and particular diseases and think that those deserve more R&D dollars. All are correct. A lot of people are very interested in homelessness, including me. A lot of people are very interested in education of all kinds, both college scholarships but also apprenticeship programs.

  I’m very interested in early education, and here the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. My mother, in running the Bezos Family Foundation, has become an expert in early education. I’m a product of Montessori schools. I started at Montessori when I was two years old, and the teacher complained to my mother that was I was too task focused and that she couldn’t get me to switch tasks; she would have to pick up my chair and move me. And by the way, if you ask the people who work with me, that’s probably still true today.

  Our schools will be free-tuition, Montessori-inspired preschool. We are going to be an operating nonprofit. I’ve hired an executive team. There’s a leadership team. We’re going to operate these schools, and we’re going to put them in low-income neighborhoods. We know for a fact that a kid who falls behind has a really, really hard time catching up, and if you can give somebody a leg up when they’re two, three, or four years old, by the time they get to kindergarten or first grade, they’re much less likely to fall behind. It can still happen, but you’ve really improved their odds. Most people are very mindful about making sure their kids get a very good preschool education and that kind of head start. That head start builds on itself fantastically. If you can get that starting at age two, three, four, there’s a powerful compounding effect there. So it’s highly levered. That’s all that really means. The money spent there is going to pay gigantic dividends for decades.

  There will also be more traditional grantmaking philanthropy. I’m going to hire a full-time team to identify and fund family homeless shelters.

  It’s Day 1. Everything I have ever done has started small. Amazon started with a couple of people. Blue Origin started with five people and a very, very small budget. Now the budget of Blue Origin is over $1 billion a year. Amazon literally started with 10 people; today it is over 750,000. That’s hard to remember for others, but for me it’s like yesterday. I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping one day we could afford a forklift. So for me, I’ve seen small things get big, and it’s part of this Day 1 mentality. I like treating things as if they’re small. Even though Amazon is a large company, I want it to have the heart and spirit of a small one. The Day One Fund is going to be like that. We’ll wander a little bit too. We have some very specific ideas about what we want to do, but I believe in the power of wandering. All my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, and guts, not analysis. When you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so, but it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, and heart, and that’s what we’ll do with this Day One Fund too. It’s part of the Day 1 mentality. As we go about building out this network of nonprofit schools, we will learn new things, and we’ll figure out how to make it better.

  The customer is going to be the child. This is so important because that is the secret sauce of Amazon. Several principles are the foundation of Amazon, but the number-one thing by far that has made us successful is obsessive, compulsive focus on the customer as opposed to the competitor. I talk so often to other CEOs and also founders and entrepreneurs, and I can tell that even though they’re talking about customers, they’re really focusing on competitors. It is a huge advantage to any company if you can stay focused on your customer instead of your competitor. You have to identify who your customer is. At the Washington Post, for example, is the customer the people who buy advertisements from us? No. The customer is the reader, full stop. And where do advertisers want to be? Advertisers want to be where there are readers, so it’s really not that complicated. Who are the customers in the school? Is it the parents? Is it the teachers? No. It is the children. We’re going to be obsessively, compulsively focused on the children; we’re going to be scientific when we can be, and we’re going to use heart and intuition when we need to.

  I intend to give away my fortune. I don’t know how much of it I’m going to give away—I’m also going to invest a lot of it in Blue Origin.

  I start with a mission, and if you have a mission, there are three ways to fulfill it: you can do it with government, you can do it through a nonprofit, and you can do it through a for-profit. If you can figure out how to do it with a for-profit structure, that has a lot of advantages for many reasons. One, it’s self-sustaining. Take the iPhone. The last thing we need is a nonprofit company making phones. It turns out there’s a healthy competitive ecosystem that likes to build these things. There’s no market failure here. If, like the Gates Foundation, you look at room-temperature vaccines, there’s no market for room-temperature vaccines. Anybody who can afford a vaccine can also afford a refrigerator, and so you need to start solving problems that have no market solution. And then you get to other things, like the court system and the military and so on. You can’t even figure out a nonprofit model.

  Where will the money go? The real answer to the question is that I’m going to give away a lot of money in a nonprofit model like the Day One Fund. But I’m also going to invest a lot of money in something, Blue Origin, which any rational investor would say is a really bad investment, but I think it is super important. I want Blue Origin to be a thriving, self-sustaining company.

  The Purpose of Going into Space

  The following remarks were made on May 9, 2019, in Washington, DC, at an event to unveil Blue Origin’s lunar lander, Blue Moon.

  BLUE ORIGIN IS the most important work I’m doing. I have great conviction about it, based on a simple argument: Earth is the best planet.

  The big question we need to ponder is: Why do we need to go to space? My answer is different from the common “plan B” argument: the Earth gets destroyed and you want to be somewhere else. It’s unmotivating and doesn’t work for me. When I was in high school I wrote, “The earth is finite, and if the world economy and population are to keep expanding, space is the only way to go.” I still believe this.

  The question “What’s the best planet in this solar system” is easy to answer because we have sent robotic probes to all the other ones. Some inspections have been flybys, but we’ve examined them all. Earth is the best planet—it is not close. This one is really good. My friends who want to move to Mars? I say, “Do me a favor. Go live on the top of Mount Everest for a year first and see if you like it—because it’s a garden paradise compared to Mars.” Don’t even get me started on Venus.

  Look at Earth. It is incredible. Jim Lovell, one of my real heroes, while he was circling around the moon on the Apollo 8 mission, did something amazing. He put out his thumb and realized that, with it at arm’s length, he could cover the whole Earth. Everything he’d ever known, he could cover with his thumb, and he said something amazing. You know the old saying “I hope I go to heaven when I die.” He said, “I realized at that moment, you go to heaven when you’re born.” Earth is heaven.

  The astronomer Carl Sagan was so poetic: “On that blue dot, that’s where everyone you know, and everyone you ever heard of, and every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. A very small stage in a great cosmic arena.” For all of human history the Earth has felt big to us, and actually in a really correct sense, it has been big. Humanity has been small. That’s not true anymore. The Earth is no longer big. Humanity is big. Earth seems big to us, but it’s finite. We have to realize that there are immediate problems, things that we need to work on, and we are working on those things. They’re urgent. I’m talking about poverty, hunger, homelessness, pollution, overfishing in the oceans. The list of immediate problems is very long, and we need to work on those things urgently, in the here and now. But there are also long-range problems: we need to work on them too, and they take a long time to solve. You can’t wait until the long-range problems are urgent to work on them. We can do both. We can work on the problems in the here and now, and we can get started on the long-range problems.

  We want to go to space to protect this planet. That’s why the company is named Blue Origin—for the blue planet, which is where we’re from. But we don’t want to face a civilization of stasis, and that is the real issue if we just stay on this planet—that’s the long-term issue.

  A very fundamental long-range problem is that we will run out of energy on Earth. This is just arithmetic. It’s going to happen. As animals, humans use ninety-seven watts of power—that’s our metabolic rate as animals—but as members of the developed world, we use ten thousand watts of power. And we get a lot of benefit from it. We live in an era of dynamism and growth. You live a better life than your grandparents did, and your grandparents lived better lives than their grandparents did, and a big part of that is the abundance of energy we have been able to harvest and use to our benefit. There are many good things that happen when we use energy. When you go to the hospital, you’re using a lot of energy. Medical equipment, transportation, the kinds of entertainments that we enjoy, the medications we use—all these things require a tremendous amount of energy. We don’t want to stop using energy. But our use levels are unsustainable.

  The historic compounding rate of global energy usage is 3 percent a year. It doesn’t sound like very much, but over many years the compounding becomes extreme. Three percent compounded annually is the equivalent of doubling human energy use every twenty-five years. If you take global energy use today, you can power everything by covering Nevada in solar cells. Now, that seems challenging, but it also seems possible, and it is mostly desert anyway. But in just a couple hundred years, at that 3 percent historic compounding rate, we’ll need to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells. Now, that’s not going to happen. That’s a very impractical solution, and we can be sure it won’t work. So what can we do?

  Well, one thing we can do is focus on efficiency, and that is a good idea. The problem, though, is that it’s already assumed. As we’ve been growing our energy usage 3 percent a year for centuries, we have always focused on efficiency. Let me give you some examples. Two hundred years ago you had to work eighty-four hours to afford one hour of artificial light. Today you have to work 1.5 seconds to afford an hour of artificial light. We’ve moved from candles to oil lamps to incandescent bulbs to LEDs and gotten tremendous efficiency gains. Another example is air transportation. In the half century of commercial aviation, we’ve seen a fourfold efficiency gain. Half a century ago it took 109 gallons of fuel to fly one person across the country. Today, in a modern 787, it takes only 24. It’s an incredible improvement. It’s very dramatic.

  How about computation? Computational efficiency has increased one trillion times. The Univac could do fifteen calculations with one kilowatt second of energy. A modern processor can do seventeen trillion calculations with one kilowatt second of energy. Now, what happens when we get very efficient? We use more of these things. Artificial light has gotten very inexpensive, so we use a lot of it. Air transport has gotten very inexpensive, so we use a lot of it. Computation has gotten very inexpensive, so we even have SnapChat.

  We have an ever-increasing demand for energy. And even in the face of increasing efficiency, we will be using more and more energy. That 3 percent compound growth rate already assumes great efficiency gains in the future. What happens when unlimited demand meets finite resources? The answer is incredibly simple: rationing. That’s the path we would find ourselves on, and that path would lead, for the first time, to your grandchildren and their grandchildren having worse lives than you. That’s a bad path.

  There’s good news: if we move out into the solar system, we will have, for all practical purposes, unlimited resources. So we get to choose: Do we want stasis and rationing? Or do we want dynamism and growth? This is an easy choice. We know what we want. We just need to get busy. We could have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization.

  What could this future look like? Where would a trillion humans live? Gerard O’Neill, a professor of physics at Princeton University, looked at this question very carefully, and he asked a very precise question that no one had ever asked before: “Is a planetary surface the best place for humans to expand into the solar system?” He and his students set to work on answering that question, and they came to a very surprising, for them, counterintuitive answer: no. Why not? Well, they came up with a bunch of problems. One is that other planetary surfaces aren’t that big. You’re talking about maybe a doubling at best, which is not that much. And they’re a long way away. Round-trip times to Mars are on the order of years, and launch opportunities to Mars occur only once every twenty-six months, which is a very significant logistics problem. And finally, you’re far enough away so that you’re not going to be able to do real-time communications with Earth. You’re going to be limited by a speed-of-light lag.