Who’s Helping Bezos Give Away $10 Billion? Seven Things to Know About the Earth Fund’s New CEO
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Andrew Steer will head the Amazon founder’s $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund. Photo: World Resources Institute
More than a year after Jeff Bezos unveiled his $10 billion climate fund, and four months after a first round of nearly $800 million in gifts made him the biggest player in climate philanthropy, the Amazon founder has hired someone to help him get the rest of the money out the door.
This week, Bezos named Andrew Steer to serve as president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. Steer previously headed the World Resources Institute (WRI), which got $100 million from Bezos in the Earth Fund’s initial set of grants.
It’s likely Bezos—who is notoriously details-oriented—will still have an active role in the fund going forward, particularly as he has recently stepped down as Amazon’s CEO. But this promotion unquestionably catapults Steer to one of the most powerful positions in climate philanthropy.
Bezos, with his first 16 grants, gave out half as much as all other foundations combined gave to climate in 2019. And the numbers are only going to rise. As Steer revealed on Twitter, Bezos aims to spend the fund’s full $10 billion by the end of the decade.
So who is Andrew Steer? The question takes on particular importance considering how little we know about the thinking behind Bezos’s giving. To date, virtually the only public statements by the fund have been three Instagram posts. The urgency with which Bezos has launched is laudable, and the climate movement dearly needs more investment. Yet the lack of transparency is particularly concerning, given the scale of power and influence that comes with such massive giving.
The first thing to know about Steer is that he’s a more prolific writer than your average CEO. I read through a bunch of his posts, among other resources, to get a better sense of the Ph.D.-holding economist and longtime World Bank staff member. Here’s what I found out.
1. He’s an international economic policy wonk and World Bank veteran
Steer knows his way around the World Bank’s corridors of power. Prior to WRI, he served for nearly three years as the global lending institution’s special envoy for climate change. Earlier, he spent 10 years in East Asia, heading up the World Bank in Vietnam and Indonesia. He also had a stint in government, working at the United Kingdom’s Department of International Development.
Steer’s background has given him a front-row seat to the shifts of such institutions on climate. For instance, in a 2012 farewell post, he recalled that when he arrived at the World Bank in the early 1980s, the entire institution had only one environmental specialist.
Steer’s work has also kept him based in Washington, D.C. In that same World Bank farewell post, he noted that his new job at WRI was only 18 blocks away from his old one. Bezos, notably, is said to have spent an increasing amount of time in D.C. since purchasing the biggest home in the city in 2016. He also happens to own the local paper, i.e., the Washington Post.
Climate and the environment may be Steer’s core mission these days, but they weren’t his starting point. He earned a Ph.D. in international economics at the University of Pennsylvania and taught the subject at Cambridge University.
2. He has promised that social justice will be a priority
“We will emphasize social justice, as climate change disproportionately hurts poor and marginalized communities,” Steer wrote in his announcement thread on Twitter. It’s a theme that comes up repeatedly in his writings, if rarely as a focus. “The environmental community must focus much more on how to ensure a just and inclusive transition,” he wrote in a 2020 Earth Day reflection on how to respond to climate change. In a similar vein, his past work at the World Bank shows he has long understood climate change as inextricably linked with global poverty.
Bezos’s initial giving suggests that he places a similar priority on such concerns. His gifts mostly favored a handful of big green groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Wildlife Fund, which have dominated environmental fundraising for decades. Yet nearly a fifth of Bezos’s initial funding—$151 million—went to organizations focused on building climate movements led by people of color.
3. He’s in favor of putting a price on carbon emissions
Steer has long looked favorably upon carbon pricing. “The most efficient, effective long-term solution to address climate change is market-based,” he wrote in an October 2020 blog post laying out his case for putting a price on carbon.
While Steer noted that such a policy should be one of many measures and that any policy should address impacts on vulnerable communities, he also maintained that carbon pricing is “the best way to use the power of the market to achieve carbon reduction goals.”
To make a case for carbon pricing’s potential for broad bipartisan support, Steer pointed to support from executives in the Business Roundtable, recommendations in the Commodities Future Trading Commission’s major recent report on climate, and the existence of carbon pricing policies in 11 states that account for one-third of U.S. GDP.
However, many in the environmental movement see carbon pricing as incompatible with social equity. Environmental justice groups have argued that the policy would worsen pollution in what are often referred to as sacrifice zones, typically low-income communities of color near polluting industries—such as Louisiana’s infamous “Cancer Alley.”
If carbon pricing does gain momentum, it will be worth watching how Steer and Bezos respond to concerns on this issue, which is one of the foundational differences between the institutional and grassroots wings of the movement.
4. He has some experience with rapid scaling
During his tenure at WRI, which began in 2012, Steer oversaw a massive expansion—the think tank’s staff grew five-fold and its budget quadrupled. He also reshaped it from a largely D.C.-based organization to an international behemoth, with the majority of its 1,400 staff based outside the United States, including in offices in Indonesia, the United Kingdom and Colombia.
As the first public hire of the Bezos Earth Fund—which does not even have a website and whose public announcements have been limited to Bezos’s Instagram posts—that experience could come in handy.
Granted, another well-staffed philanthropic institution isn’t exactly something the climate movement lacks. Let’s hope Steer’s expertise is focused on facilitating the expansion of the climate movement—and building the fund only insofar as is necessary to improve transparency and continue the rapid distribution of its remaining billions.
5. He has repeatedly advocated for “radical” change
Steer recently wrote that “radical sectoral shifts” are needed for countries like the U.K. to meet their 2030 goals, such as recent decisions to halt the sale of gasoline and diesel-powered automobiles by 2030 or 2035. “We need more such moonshots, but they will require governments, corporations and citizens to overcome deeply entrenched interests, which requires unconventional leadership,” he wrote in a December blog post.
It was a theme Steer returned to on Twitter as he announced his new position. “During my time @WorldResources, we helped to change the mindset from that of ‘costs and trade-offs’ to that of ‘investments and opportunities’ and shown that radical systems change is possible and can bring a stronger economy, a fairer society and a better future,” he wrote.
Of course, considering his past leadership of one of the largest establishment green groups on the planet and his career in the World Bank, any use by Steer of the R-word should be read more as rhetoric than call for revolution. But now that he’s in the position to make grants rather than ask for them, and with the climate clock quickly running down, perhaps some surprises are in store.
6. He has prioritized corporate partnerships
Corporate partnerships are, unsurprisingly, a priority of Steer’s new boss. Bezos co-founded the Climate Pledge and later bought the rights to put the effort’s name in big green letters on the roof of the stadium of the new NHL team in Seattle. Such work is familiar territory for Steer.
The World Resources Institute, like virtually all of the nation’s largest green groups, has been involved in a wide variety of efforts to drive corporate engagement on climate. For instance, the think tank is a member of the CEO Climate Dialogue—a group of nearly two dozen companies with more than $1.4 trillion in combined annual revenue, and three other major environmental nonprofit organizations.
Similarly, along with the World Wildlife Fund, it is one of the partners of Science-Based Targets, a project to get corporations to set goals in line with keeping global temperatures under 1.5 degrees Celsius—the more ambitious of the two thresholds used in the Paris Agreement.
And WRI was one of the coordinators of We Are Still In, a pledge for businesses and others to adhere to the benchmarks laid out by the Paris Agreement despite the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the accord. Steer wrote about the effort in a 2019 New York Times op-ed co-authored with an executive vice president at Walmart.
7. He has moonlighted as one of the most iconic animals on earth
During his time at the World Bank, Steer surprised the young attendees at a Take Our Daughters to Work Day by dressing up in a full panda suit. The occasion was immortalized in a photo in the June 1995 issue of the institution’s publication, Bank’s World.
“We used to have a human in charge of the Environment Department, but sometimes, human beings only worry about other humans,” Peter Panda, aka Andrew Steer, reportedly told the children.
What can we expect?
It’s worth repeating that Bezos has said very little to date about his climate priorities. What we have to go on is what we can infer from his grants to date, as well as his actions as he built Amazon into the commercial giant it is today—a not insignificant record, but an indirect measure. Steer, by contrast, has an archive of articles and publications stretching back decades.
Nevertheless, the overriding first impression is one of alignment. Both Steer and Bezos have prioritized expanding corporate action on climate. Both have supported social justice in their own ways. Both are particularly keen on market approaches. Both are white men in a movement that has been slow to diversify. None of this is particularly surprising.
One element of deviation we might reasonably expect, however, is disclosure. Steer—busy blogger that he has been—will hopefully bring a bit more sunlight to the Earth Fund’s operations and deliberations. Beyond that, it’s hard to know what to expect. But given the outsized role of Bezos, who as I write this is not only the largest climate philanthropist but the world’s richest man, this relationship could have similarly outsized influence.
