Amazon Backs Out of Climate Pledge, Deletes Shipment Zero Initiative Blogpost

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-shipment-zero-gives-up-most-important-part-climate-pledge-2023-5

by scrum-treats • 3 years ago

516 174 3 years ago

businessinsider.com

scrum-treats• 3 years ago

Archived Version: https://archive.ph/W7jUR.

Deleted blogpost: https://web.archive.org/web/20230525232713/https://www.about....

See also: Amazon fights to kill emissions bill in Oregon, despite climate pledge [1].

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35444181

Prickle9• 3 years ago

It's a shame really, false statements by corporations rarely get prosecuted.

Corporate statements\speech needs to be regulated. There needs to be a law that holds them explicitly to any and all statements.

readthenotes12• 3 years ago

Why should corporations be held more accountable than any other person*?

varenc2• 3 years ago

Your link to the deleted blog post is wrong. Here's the real link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230122230554/https://www.about...

Your link was just to their main site, which is still online now.

(The root problem is that the posted article's link is also broken due to the affiliate/click tracking stuff businessinsider.com adds. Their redirect system assumes its safe to add additional query args but the wayback machine interprets these as part of the old url to find in its archives)

varenc2• 3 years ago

I tweeted at the article's author and they've now fixed their link as well :-)

dendrite9• 3 years ago

Well I hope they don't change the Stadium name, that's how I knew they were serious.

CaptainNegative• 3 years ago

This HN post has a misleading title (as of the time of this comment).

They backed out of a climate pledge (50% delivery emissions reduction by 2030), not "The" Climate Pledge (100% cross-sector carbon neutral by 2040 and a few other things).

Retric• 3 years ago

In theory sure, except backing out of the more achievable short term pledges as they become relevant says really bad things about the more difficult longer term ones.

cheeze• 3 years ago

I totally agree, but I do agree with the commenter that the title is pretty disingenuous.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

Looks like Amazon is also dragging its feet on moving to an all-electric local delivery fleet:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/13/rivian_amazon_electri...

Tesla and Ford seem to have some kind of commercial delivery e-van in the works, though.

The net-zero claims are mostly nonsense in any case -it means continuing to use fossil fuels for jet transport and shipping/trucking while buying 'offsets' in a dubious and unscientific carbon-trading scheme to reach so-called 'net-zero'.

Such offsets don't remove any of the fossil fuel-sourced carbon pumped into the atmosphere on anything like a long-term basis, and are best classified as a fraudulent program pushed by fossil fuel interests in the name of greenwashing their business.

asdff2• 3 years ago

Airlines seem to be more in favor of investing in biofuels for jets than to have them use some other energy source.

A review: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2020.0011...

jabl• 3 years ago

To be honest, liquid hydrocarbons are a very good energy source when weight and volume is important, like aircraft. Battery-electric planes will likely become a thing for short range flights, but I'm having a hard time seeing how anything like the current level of long range flights would be compatible with a "zero carbon" society. Biofuels and synthetic fuels will allow a limited amount of long range flights though, so I don't think we'd need to give up on those entirely.

PKop3• 3 years ago

Awesome, good for them. More should oppose the insane climate propaganda and not cave to ideological mob pressure.

andsoitis• 3 years ago

insane climate propaganda

In a nutshell, what is the climate propaganda?

blooalien• 3 years ago

"Climate propaganda" is any statement that places environment, life, or literally anything else above the idea that our filthy rich overlords desperately need more money even if it kills us all. More money for the filthy rich is the only thing that matters in the entire Universe. If you believe otherwise, you're a filthy heathen heretic hippie tree hugger.

smolder6• 3 years ago

The ideology of wanting humans to not send themselves to extinction like we're doing to so many other species. How horrible!

monero-xmr6• 3 years ago

Humans will not send themselves to extinction if the earth gets a few degrees warmer. That is the propaganda. We survived ice ages, and with our modern technology we will survive warming.

I'm not saying there won't be negatives, but to say we are all going to die, is absurd to the extreme. Unfortunately that is common today, however it is merely one in a long line of apocalyptic movements which have been common in every century in recorded history.

userbinator• 3 years ago

That's what they want you to believe.

Harnessing fear itself has proven to be a powerful tool of controlling the masses.

Realise the truth and it will set you free.

PKop3• 3 years ago

Whichever group/nation abstains from consuming better energy sources will just get run over by the the nations that don't make that mistake. ESG et all are national suicide pacts, look at Europe. They are declining, and will be a weaker power as they use less energy than their competitors. Human history and the human condition is conflict and competition, you have to win the game against others, not voluntarily lose it.

missedthecue2• 3 years ago

There is no threat of extinction, this is silly.

MentallyRetired• 3 years ago

YES, let the fascism wash over us. More profit. Forget the people and the polar bears. As long as the imaginary bank account number grows and grows and we're beating the other rich people, none of that stuff matters. We're building a rocketship anyways and we won't be here much longer. We'll leave them all gasping for air in the wake of our plumage. Yesssss Bezos Yes.

harry82• 3 years ago

Yeah look there's nothing in the above I'm actively disagreeing with here. What I am disagreeing with is the way you've said that. It isn't productive. It doesn't shed any light on things. It doesn't assume the best of the person you're replying to. It goes nowhere.

There's plenty of other places where this kind of response is welcome. Also @dang will get cross and we can't have that.

xracy• 3 years ago

What? No! But they super-duper pinky promised.

TBH, I don't know why they would do this instead of just... silently missing the target, like I assume most businesses are going to do.

chii• 3 years ago

They managed to get the PR benefits from having made the pledge, and the news cycle has moved on from it.

asdff2• 3 years ago

Great day to do it too, I just googled AMZN to see if anythings been written and articles about Nvidias big day are coming up instead.

skwb• 3 years ago

I live in the Seattle area now, and I find it hilarious that the public transportation infrastructure around Climate Pledge Arena (which Amazon bought the naming rights for) is horrendously bad. My wife and I looked into taking the subway + somehow transferring to the monorail, only to see that service was super limited by the time the concert finished.

We end up parking nearby since it's cheaper/easier to do so. Completely the worst set of incentives.

tomcam• 3 years ago

Is Amazon responsible for Seattle public transit in return for naming rights or something? Not following your logic.

whatever1• 3 years ago

Tech population grew faster than the infrastructure in the wider Seattle area. Especially after the return-to-office mandates from the companies, traffic is at LA levels. 1-2 hour 1-way commutes are common.

balls187• 3 years ago

I regularly go to events at CPA and use public transport (which is free for anyone with a ticket to a CPA event).

Sounds like you couldn't figure it out, that's not the fault of the infrastructure, but rather bad UX for route planning. FWIW, Paris Metro (which is great) also had wonky UX, until you get the hang of it.

Anyway, take the Link Light Rail to Westlake Station. That's where you catch the Monorail to CPA. Do it in reverse at the end of your event.

manacit• 3 years ago

I live down in the south end and have taken the train + monorail more than once to a concert at Climate Pledge without issue, absolutely no issues.

The Monorail takes Orca now, and the transfer at Westlake is not bad at all. I would highly recommend giving it a try.

icelancer• 3 years ago

Yeah, I agree. There's a decent bit to complain about RE: bus routes (lol Northgate to Ballard being impossible somehow) but public transportation in Seattle is largely pretty good. I commuted downtown daily on various bus lines before the light rail was a thing, and when I go downtown now from South Seattle, the light rail is quite solid.

Light rail -> monorail -> Climate Pledge works extremely well. Not sure why GP is complaining, or anyone. The monorail was completely useless forever, no doubt about it, but now it's actually good for the Kraken and shows at Climate Pledge.

93po• 3 years ago

I also recently did just this without any problems. A minor wait after the Kraken game for the monorail, but I took my sweet time getting there and it was only a 10-15 min wait.

lchengify• 3 years ago

I live in the area. Theoretically the West Seattle / Ballard link extensions will include stops at Seattle Center (park between the Space Needle and Climate Pledge Arena).

Shovels in the ground 2026, ETA 2037.

[1] https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion/west-seattle-b...

[2] https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion/west-seattle-b...

hackernewds2• 3 years ago

That ETA is hilarious. Hope we have a planet worth redemption by the

cantaloupe2• 3 years ago

Downtown Seattle’s not that big. Walking from Westlake (light rail) to Climate Pledge is 20-25 minutes, no transfer needed.

Aeolun3• 3 years ago

I don’t know about you, but 20 minutes sounds like quite a walk. It’s absolutely possible, and can be done for fun, but if your main goal is going to a concert tacking on another 40 minutes walking may be mildly frustrating.

_huayra_• 3 years ago

They even added a "reverse incentive": you can park in any of the Amazon garages for free after 4pm or any time on weekends (as long as you leave by 2am, and even then the charges are pretty cheap if you blow past the deadline).

seanmcdirmid2• 3 years ago

The rapid bus D line goes straight there if you live in Ballard. That will be replaced by a light rail when I’m retired. We go to Seattle center a lot, though never for the arena.

The monorail is cool, but if you have transit links in Seattle and the monorail is OOS, you can always walk that stretch pretty easily.

verst• 3 years ago

I live in Ballard and frequent the D and 40 buses to get to Seattle center or downtown. Uber / Lyft are insanely expensive now, and I have a zero alcohol policy when I'm driving.

lynx23• 3 years ago

cheaper/easier to do so

Right, with this attitude, nothing will ever improve. Yes, infrastructure needs to be built, no question. But if "cheaper/easier to do" are the only criteria for people to decide how to act, we are doomed. Get your act together and make some sacrifice, or stop talking about climate change altogether.

charles_f• 3 years ago

Honestly, at this stage, if it doesn't align directly with increasing the baseline on the short term, it's hard to see any sort of pledge from large companies as anything more than PR. Amazon backed out, but they could very well have done like the others and buy bullshit carbon offset credits - I guess the math on their tax deductions didn't work.

Assuming that we think within system, till incentives like punitive taxation are devised to force the hand of big corporations on that topic, nothing will change. But that won't happen because of lobbies and yaddi-yadda. And even if, I doubt if they wouldn't find ways around it.

So, yeah.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan• 3 years ago

I mean if the company market cap is skyrocketing and they're making money hand over fist, I think you can read any pledge as "we pledge to do this thing as long as the money continues to pour in at the current rate or better."

Whenever revenue starts contracting, all the old promises are basically empty words.

vasco2• 3 years ago

Same way if it gets cold, or food is missing from the supermarket everyone will temporarily stop caring about the environment. Priorities are there for a reason.

ohthehugemanate• 3 years ago

I think microsoft is the only large hyperscaler that seems to take this as more than a shallow PR push. Their goal is carbon zero by 2030 - not net zero, but actually removing as much carbon from the atmosphere as they put in. They pay for actual carbon removal and help develop that tech in order to get there. And their targets are all three classes of emissions (ie including indirect emissions) which no other tech company even talks about. That's recognized within the carbon monitoring industry... I think they're on the CDP A list for carbon for the third year in a row now? (Amzn and goog have never been there)

On the other hand, I don't see people in tech making buying decisions based on this. Why does your company use AWS or GCP, and did the "nothing more than PR" state of their climate commitments even come up in that decision?

Complaining on the internet is fun, but changing buying habits is better.

fomine3• 3 years ago

Microsoft also bet for nuclear fusion. I wonder are both really work by 2030 or scam.

drivebycomment• 3 years ago

Alphabet is also on CDP A list for climate in 2022, and they have the similar commitment for zero carbon by 2030.

I don't see significant enough difference in climate response regarding between Azure and GCP.

jbm• 3 years ago

If you look at my post history, you will see a lot of angry posts about Teams and other Microsoft products, but after reading this I'm probably going to take it easier on them.

Legitimately turned me around on them, thanks for sharing.

zelphirkalt• 3 years ago

That is nice and great if true. However, what if I moved the goalpost just tiny bit to include all the emissions, that MS' ever more resource demanding OSes and the bad engineering and unwanted stuff inside them causes? That would include the emissions and environmental harm caused by not too technical people being forced to buy new computers every 3 years, because their old ones become unbearably slow by normal usage or become slow due to being tricked into upgrading to the next Windows version, which is more demanding on the hardware.

MS would probably be bankrupt soon, if they paid for repairing that damage to the environment.

alfor• 3 years ago

Let corporation be greedy and honest about it.

Regulation/incentives and even more technology is going to move the needle, not some greenwashing initiative.

renewiltord• 3 years ago

This shit is pointless. It doesn't move the needle with consumers (who are price conscious above all) and activists (who require purity). If you give in to activists a little you will be punished harder than if you do nothing at all primarily because activists don't want an outcome so much as they want to be activists.

Given this, serve your customers at all costs. The environment is something you can deal with later.

PeterStuer• 3 years ago

'Net Zero' as all the 'offset' based schemes are greenwashing accounting shenanigans designed to avoid having to really restrain your emissions.

Gigachad• 3 years ago

It's so crazy when you dig in to it. Take some protected forest, then claim "uh actually we are going to bulldoze this unless you buy our carbon credits" then vastly over calculate how much carbon is stored, sell it off as credits for not bulldozing it, and then a few years later, sell the same forest again for credits.

And then consumers think they are all cool and good because their flight was "offset". Carbon offsetting is not real. If your product or consumption is creating greenhouse gasses, the only solution is to stop consuming it until it becomes more efficient itself rather than rely on accounting trickery.

aae42• 3 years ago

What's even funnier is when they sell the carbon credit for huge swaths of land that are completely unbuildable and will never really be bulldozed ever...

Yea it's a carbon sink, but it'll always be one. There's no way to get ahead

lozenge• 3 years ago

Yes, actual net zero would involve removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is impossible at the scale these companies require. The equipment doesn't exist beyond a few tiny demonstration projects, and if it did it would cost 100x what the companies want to pay.

Offsets are like me offsetting the cost of a night out by buying a coffee machine to help my wife to skip Starbucks. The bank balance still goes down.

knallfrosch• 3 years ago

I've found out that I can fly 1,000 times net zero per year if I offset that by not flying another 1,000 times.

It's that simple.

iLoveOncall• 3 years ago

Can dang fix the absolute bullshit editorialized title? They did not back out of the climate pledge at all, even the bullet points below the main picture say so: "The company is rolling the goal into a broader Climate Pledge."

LatteLazy• 3 years ago

At this point, individual, corporate and even national actions are totally pointless. It's a binding international agreement or we all just do our own thing.

eb0la• 3 years ago

One of the reasons I quitted Amazon Prime was ecology. My neighborhood is plagued with Amazon delivery vans. They are everywhere, double parked, which makes traffic a mess in a place that used to be a quiet neigborhood. I am sure Amazon has no idea about how many CO2 they emit, since most of them are freelance contractors. But since they don't pay much, they have no low emission vehicles, and makes the rest of the people emit more CO2 since they double park everywhere.

curiousgal• 3 years ago

It's funny because, if anything, this post highlights the futility of consumer-level actions. One corporate action can have the effect of all individual actions of thousands of people over their entire lifetime.

rtpg2• 3 years ago

I somewhat understand the nihilism at play here, but it's not like those trucks exist absent consumer demand. They aren't driving around for fun!

It doesn't matter that you are not giving the company money anymore, until enough people independently make that decision and then it starts mattering. This is a thing that happens in every economic sphere.

rcme3• 3 years ago

Having N people drive to your neighborhood could be more efficient than M people driving to the store individually if M >> N. So now when you want something you drive to the store? How is that better?

aubanel• 3 years ago

I think the key difference is that in the absence of fast delivery, when you need something, you'll just wait a bit until you have more things to buy. So you'll do one trip to the store for 10 items. Plus you'll go to other places on the way (and meet people but that's another aspect). So the real number is not M but M // 10.

So i'd say fast delivery indeed increases the number of trips, since it enables people to be lazier and just order whenever they need something.

ChatGTP• 3 years ago

I just quit my prime over this news. I was not really buying much from Amazon, I have a list of stuff I need and when it gets big enough I go get it all from local stores so support them. I was kind of keeping prime for the TV and because of their eco pledge. Now that’s gone. I’m not longer a customer, and I couldn’t care less about it.

myshpa• 3 years ago

The wrong Amazon is burning.

strus• 3 years ago

Carrying about climate was the zero interest rate phenomenon.

Traubenfuchs• 3 years ago

I would expect anyone radical enough to care about this probably doesn't order from Amazon anyways.

TheLoafOfBread• 3 years ago

Companies are starting to figure out that being carbon neutral is expensive. Something what regular people have figured out long time ago.

solarkraft• 3 years ago

It should be less expensive than emitting carbon

Amazon Backs Out of Climate Pledge, Deletes Shipment Zero Initiative Blogpost

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