Amazon Talking Carbon Footprint 10 Years After Most Competitors Did; "Net Zero" Plan Smelling Fishy

Amazon says it will reduce the carbon footprint of the trucks, vans and planes that deliver its smiley-faced boxes to consumers around the world. The tech giant’s brief announcement did not disclose how it plans to do that, and a spokesperson, as usual for the secretive company, declined to answer questions.

Amazon did say it will reveal something it has kept secret for many years: the impact it has on the world’s climate. Unlike many big tech firms and shipping companies, Amazon has never revealed how much carbon pollution it causes. That’s despite years of requests from investors, journalists and activists.

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Cutting emissions by about half by 2030, and eliminating them by 2050, is what climate scientists say is needed globally to keep the world from overheating by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. If Amazon’s retail sales keep growing, its total shipping emissions would not fall by half under the goal it announced Monday.

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Yet Amazon’s use of the term “net zero” suggests that the company is looking at some mix of cleaning up its own operations and paying others to reduce or absorb pollution elsewhere, through mechanisms such as carbon offsets. Deutsch called the “net zero” term a red flag. “The problem with paying someone else to reduce pollution elsewhere is that it’s doing nothing to actually reduce the pollution along the shipping routes where the diesel vans and trucks are traveling,” Deutsch said. That can leave poor communities, often communities of color, near highways and ports still breathing unhealthy amounts of diesel exhaust.

Category-defying Amazon, of course, is more than just a retailer or logistics company. The data centers behind its cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services, also make Amazon one of America’s biggest consumers of electricity and biggest carbon polluters. Amazon publicizes its green-energy purchases, but according to internal company documents obtained by KUOW in 2017, those purchases haven’t kept up with the company’s rapid growth. Those documents showed Amazon Web Services carbon emissions doubling in just three years.

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https://www.kuow.org/stories/amazon-plans-to-reveal-its-carbon-footprint-something-many-big-tech-firms-already-do-here-s-why-that-matters