Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos Just Revealed a Massive Plan to Fight Climate Change

Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person in modern history, as well as the Chief Executive of e-commerce giant Amazon, has a plan to help fight climate change.

Bezos unveiled his big plans on Thursday on how to tackle climate change and called it the “Climate Pledge.” Amazon is planning to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement 10 years ahead of schedule.

The Paris climate agreement of 2015 is planning to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius and meaningfully reduce man-made emissions by the year 2050.

Bezos expects 80% of Amazon’s energy use to come from renewable sources by 2024. Currently the rate is 40%. By 2030 the company will transition to zero emissions.

“We want to use our scale and our scope to lead the way,” Bezos explained at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

He added, “One of the things we know about Amazon as a role model for this is that it’s a difficult challenge for us because we have deep, large physical infrastructure. So, if we can do this, anyone can do this.”

Amazon has agreed to purchase 100,000 electric delivery vans from vehicle manufacturer Rivian with the first electric delivery vans expected to be on the road by 2021. Bezos estimates 100,000 vehicles will be deployed by 2024.

Amazon senior vice president for operations Dave Clark tweeted, “Our fleet is Electrifying! Thrilled to announce the order of 100,000 electric delivery vehicles – the largest order of electric delivery vehicles ever. Look out for the new vans starting in 2021.”

Amazon has invested $440 million in Rivian so far.

The company additionally announced a $100 million donation to The Nature Conservancy to form the Right Now Climate Fund.

Dara O’Rourke, a senior principal scientist on Amazon’s sustainability team, stated, “Amazon is as complex as many companies combined. That forced us to build one of the most sophisticated carbon accounting systems in the world. We had to build a system that had the granular data, but at an Amazon scale.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and have not been compensated for this article.