Are Amazon Corporate Green-washers?
Are Amazon potentially one of the more toxic companies in tech from a sustainability perspective?
If you do nothing else, please at least consider ignoring anything they publish on the subject of sustainability. It is likely missing 99% of reality and paints a false narrative. Just look at their carbon reporting tool that they continue to push this dashboard despite knowing it reports less than 1% of reality.
Here’s a few points to consider:
1) Their annual reported emissions have grown by a massive 34.5% since 2019 (more carbon than the 71 lowest emitting countries combined). Despite this they still push their nonsense 2040 net zero goal but have no interim reduction targets. Given their alleged underreporting, the actual increase is likely 99x larger.
2) Amazon dramatically undercounts emissions, not counting lifecycle emissions of all the products they sell; only counting Amazon-branded products, which make up 1% of their sales.
3) They delete any goal they aren’t on track to hit, such as their Shipment Zero goal to make half of shipments net-zero by 2030. This one led to them being kicked out from the Science Based Targets Initiative.
4) Despite claims that to have reached 100% renewable energy, the reality is that their data centres are driving up demand for fossil fuels. They use creative accounting and an over-reliance on low quality renewable energy credits (RECs). Insiders estimate that they only get 22% renewable energy from the local utilities in their major regions, and they are investing in expansion in locations heavily dependent on oil, gas, and coal.
5) Amazon makes billions from selling AI services to fossil fuel companies, helping them extract more oil and gas. The report I’ve linked, projects that by next year, AWS could be making 10% of their revenue ($9.6 billion) annually from the oil and gas industry alone.
6) Amazon’s current EV commitments likely won’t even cover a third of the packages it’s projected to deliver in 2030. Their existing deployments of EVs only handle portions of the trips for 9.7% of packages it delivered last year.
The whistle-blower report is linked down below