Vampire Planet: Hey DiCaprio, Bezos Ain’t Our Friend

Joshua Frank

 August 14, 2026

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Amazon AWS data center, image Wikipedia.

Most would agree that the animals suffering as the world burns need our help. So Jeff Bezos and Leonardo DiCaprio’s $200 million commitment to the Phoenix Species Project to revive 100 endangered species around the world should be welcome news.

Leo believes it is.

“I could not be prouder to announce this,” DiCaprio wrote joyously in an Instagram post. “Save these species, and we protect everything around them. The forests, the rivers, and the climate itself.”

I sincerely hope that’s true and that these creatures, including a lemur in Madagascar, a pink iguana in the Galápagos, a pancake tortoise in Tanzania, see tangible benefits from conservation efforts.

Yet I can’t help but sense a perversity in all of this. 

The initiative is being funded with Bezos’s blood money, as was his 2020 launch of the $10 billion greenwashed Earth Fund. All the cash Bezos is throwing at the environment is nowhere near enough to offset the damage caused by the creation of his obscene wealth, which places him in the top three richest people on the planet. Amazon, the company that made him all that money, is one of the world’s largest corporate climate polluters.

Even under the company’s own accounting (which critics contend is far from accurate), Amazon’s 2025 carbon emissions surpassed its 2024 record, reaching 80 million metric tons, a 16% increase. Its electric purchases, primarily for data centers, jumped by 34%, and emissions from Amazon’s fleet of delivery and transport vehicles increased by 20%, accounting for over 76% of its total carbon footprint.

This doesn’t even take into consideration the emissions from Bezos’s lavish lifestyle and excessive investment portfolio. He owns two private jets and a $500 million, 417-foot superyacht, which together emit about 10,000 tons of CO2.

According to a damning Oxfam report, Bezos is responsible, through his corporations, investments and consumption, for a million times more carbon pollution than the average person.

“The world’s poorest communities, those who have done the least to cause climate change – those who are least able to respond and recover – are the ones who are suffering the worst consequences. This is unfair and immoral,” Oxfam International’s inequality policy adviser Alex Maitland told The Guardian.

Bezos’s contribution to climate change is about to get a whole lot worse.

A proposed data center in Pecos County, Texas, is so large that its 35 gas-burning turbines, operating at 7.65 gigawatts, will make it the country’s single largest source of fossil fuel emissions. It will emit an insane 33 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution each year. 

“That’s a stunning amount of carbon exhaust, putting that single data center in a league with entire countries including Switzerland, Ireland, and Bulgaria,” writes Joe Wilkins at Futurism.

This is just one more example (and I detail many more in the forthcoming Bad Energy) of why renewables can’t keep up with our ever-increasing demand for electricity, thanks in no small part to billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Big Tech’s appetite for data center destruction.

Amazon is relying on gas to run its fleet of servers because solar and wind would require an immense amount of land to build out. 

A solar farm requires up to 7,000 acres to supply 1 GW of electricity. For Amazon’s future data center in Texas (if we don’t stop it), the company would need 49,000 acres of land covered with solar panels to generate 7 GW of electricity. That’s over 76 square miles, roughly the size of Madison, Wisconsin.

Sorry, Leo, I know you think you’re doing a good thing here by trying to save imperiled species from extinction, but your buddy Jeff Bezos can’t buy his way out of the destruction he’s manifested.

Oh, and while you’re closing the door on Bezos, could you divest from that disgusting eco-resort you’re helping finance in Israel, too?

Thanks.

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Want to show your contempt for all these data centers and the destruction they are causing?

You can bundle Bad Energy with this cool t-shirt, designed by CounterPuncher and artist Roger Peet, available at Pilsen Community Books (US shipping only).

The shirt and a signed book will ship September 8, while supplies last.

JOSHUA FRANK is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, and the forthcoming, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who are Selling Off Our Future, both with Haymarket Books. He can be reached at joshua@counterpunch.org. You can troll him on Bluesky @joshuafrank.bsky.social

Fauci Chose to “Take the Fifth” and Left Too Many Questions Unanswered

Daniel Warner

 August 14, 2026

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Photograph Source: NIAID – CC BY 2.0

We all make choices. Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, invoked the Fifth Amendment over 100 times when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on July 29. Subpoenaed to testify about his handling of the COVID pandemic and the questions surrounding the origins of the virus, Fauci declined to answer the committee’s substantive questions, a striking departure from his previous appearance before the House in 2024, when he answered questions for hours and defended his actions and decisions during the pandemic.

Fauci began his testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic with,“Thank you for this opportunity to testify.” Two years later, before the Senate Committee, he said: “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect that I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

What changed?

Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment before Congress put him in an unusual but well-established American tradition. Government officials like Oliver North have relied on the constitutional protection when congressional questioning threatened to expose them to possible criminal liability. Many Hollywood figures such as Abraham Polonsky and Carl Foreman “Took the Fifth” before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the “Red Scare” when faced with congressional questioning about associations with the Communist Party. Donald Trump once famously asked, “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth?” He later invoked the Fifth Amendment hundreds of times during a 2022 civil deposition, explaining that his lawyers had advised him he had no practical alternative.

But the good Dr. Fauci taking the Fifth? “To many,” Katie Rogers wrote in the Times, “this was a tacit admission of guilt from the 85-year-old, who retired from public service in 2022.” David Wallace-Wells, also writing in the Times, called it “cowardly.”

Fauci was not always “cowardly.” Before Fauci even began speaking before the House in 2024, Republican Chairman Brad Wenstrup said: “First, I want to thank you for decades of public service. You served your country through multiple epidemics, pandemics, and health crisis.” He continued: “Regardless of any disagreements we may have, you chose to serve and I want to extend our appreciation and gratitude. I also want to thank you for your willing cooperation with the Select Subcommittee.”

Wenstrup added: “You have voluntarily sat for more than 14 hours of testimony and are appearing voluntarily today. This is more than we can say about other witnesses we have called, and we appreciate it.”

In 2026, Fauci began his testimony on very different terms: “However, given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently, his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary, aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something—anything—that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”

In 2026, Fauci clearly believed that Rand Paul and the Republicans on the committee were out to get him. Trump has called Fauci an “idiot,” a “phony,” and a “terrible ‘athlete’.” Paul and the committee were following the same line of attack.

Fauci was later lambasted by RFK Jr. on CNN August 2: “Now we know that Anthony Fauci, who was the expert, was lying about everything, about masks, about the social distancing, about natural immunity, about the transmission from the vaccine, about the source of COVID,” said the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Committee voted along party lines on August 6 to hold Fauci in contempt and referred the matter to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. It is unclear whether the Department will take up the case.

Beyond the criticisms of Fauci, the major change between 2024 and 2026 may have been the image of Fauci himself. During the pandemic, he was the medical expert as well as the kindly family doctor. He had the nation’s respect and confidence.

The recently released diary material has given critics a very different view of Fauci’s private personality. The Washington Post, for example, reported that the entries showed him reflecting on his fame and media coverage, including references to spending time with A-listers such as Julia Roberts. The diary changed the public image of Fauci, but it doesn’t answer the substantive questions that Congress was asking.

Why did Fauci take the Fifth and refuse to answer the committee—and the public—about his actions during the pandemic?

Perhaps the answer is as simple as the one he gave: his lawyers advised him that answering could expose him to criminal liability. Perhaps he genuinely believed that Senator Paul’s repeated calls for prosecution made it impossible for him to testify without putting himself at risk, despite the pardon issued to him by Joe Biden.

In an article in The New Yorker, Amy Davidson Sorkin also questioned Fauci’s decision not to answer. “Yet Fauci’s silence was a loss. Paul may have come at the matter with theatrics and ill will, but some of his questions, in their most basic forms, are worth exploring, because the debate about where the novel coronavirus came from is ongoing, divisive, and important.” David Wallace-Wells made a similar point in the Times.

And after everything Americans and the world were told about—and suffered through—during COVID, perhaps asking those questions is not unreasonable. The virus, the vaccines, lockdowns, masks, social distancing and the people making those decisions all affected millions of lives.

Beyond asking why Fauci changed between 2024 and 2026, I would like to know more about the choices he made before and during the pandemic. Is he holding back until he writes a best-selling tell-all? Why he took the Fifth is only one question. He made choices that affected millions of people. Those choices need explanations as well.

Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations. (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva.