Founder Of Patagonia Clothing Has Donated The Entirety Of The Company Valued At $3B To Non-Profits Fighting Climate Change Like An Idiot
The billionaire founder of outdoor apparel brand Patagonia is giving away the company to a trust that will use its profit to fight the climate crisis.
Yvon Chouinard, 83, said on Wednesday that instead of selling the company or taking it public, he would transfer his family's ownership to the trust and a non-profit organization.
Chouinard became famous for alpine climbs in Yosemite National Park and has a net worth of $1.2 billion.
Each year, the money we make after reinvesting in the business will be distributed as a dividend to help fight the crisis,' he wrote in an open letter on the company's website, which bears the words 'Earth is now our only shareholder.'
'Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we'll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.'
The Patagonia founder took a more direct tack in an interview with the New York Times, saying: 'Hopefully this will influence a new form of capitalism that doesn't end up with a few rich people and a bunch of poor people.
'We are going to give away the maximum amount of money to people who are actively working on saving this planet.
"The Earth is our only shareholder now"--Patagonia Founder, Yvon Chouinard.
That might be the most self congratulatory, pretentious statement of all time. I like the Patagonia brand. What white guy suburban guy in their 30s hasn't worn the vest or the fleece jacket and maybe a trucker hat trying to give their wardrobe a hint of granola with patagonia to let the girls know that "hey, I care about the earth, despite my pasty skin I have been outside (top down on dad's convertible), and I shop at places besides jcrew and banana republic"? I am also very cool with people doing whatever the fuck they want with their company and their money. You want to give it away, fine by me. You earned that right to piss off your children.
Giving it away to non-profits focused on climate change though...barf. Not because it's not a worthy cause, but because there's a million of those organizations and not a single one of them have the power to reverse or slow climate change. None of them have even a 1% track record of success. Mr Chouinard would be better off lighting that cash on fire even with the carbon that a $3B bonfire would release into the atmosphere.
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I would like a $1B to fund my ideas for climate change called "holes and gutters". Long time dogwalk listeners know of these plans and science is apparently stealing one of them already. Just...make more ice
I had one idea to just take cold water from the bottom of the ocean and bring it up to the surface with a series of power sump pumps powered by solar panels. That instagram kind of looks like that.
My other idea is a gutter and pipeline system. When the glaciers start melting you simply install a gutter system at the base to capture that water and then send it back up towards the wherever the glacier game from to begin with. Way further inland so it just refreezes. Glaciers on a permanent loop. Problem solved.
Then...my favorite idea...holes.
TL:DR…any place that has a depression on a continent you just fill up with water. That place pictured is the Qattara depression in Egypt. Nobody lives there. Nobody goes there. It's in the desert but not that far from the Mediterranean Sea. You build a canal and fill up the depression with water. They say that if you filled up that area with water it would create so much moisture in the air that the Sahara desert would get enough rainfall to turn into a grassland. You know what is the best system ever created to capture carbon….grasslands.
Give me $3B and I will fix everything. Just need to think outside the box. Put money towards climate change projects and not climate change activism where children run around screaming and protesting and bullying world leaders to shutdown nuclear plants across Europe until they're forced to start burning coal again because of an energy shortage that they somehow didn't see coming.