Five years into Amazon’s Climate Pledge, workers challenge its progress

Five years after Amazon committed to an ambitious climate goal, the company says it is making progress on reducing emissions—but critics allege those calculations are misleading.

In its annual sustainability report, released last week, Amazon said carbon emissions dropped 3% last year, largely due to its sizable investment in renewable energy. That’s the most significant decrease the Seattle-based company has seen since it launched its Climate Pledge in 2019, setting a goal to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

But Amazon’s carbon emissions are still nearly 20 million metric tons greater than at the start of its five-year journey.

Since 2019, Amazon has remained steadfast in its ability to meet its goal. It has secured more than 500 signatories to its Climate Pledge commitment, and has touted progress on initiatives like adding more electric vehicles to its delivery fleet, increasing its recyclable packaging and decreasing its water use in data centers.

In its report, the company said it met one milestone seven years earlier than it had anticipated. In 2023, it “matched” all of the electricity consumed across its global operations—including data centers, corporate buildings, grocery stores and fulfillment centers—with 100% renewable energy.

But, critics say that sunny outlook isn’t telling the story.

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice—an independent group of workers who have been pressuring the company to take more action to reduce its impact on the environment since before the genesis of the Climate Pledge—released its own contradictory sustainability report on the same day as Amazon.

The report alleges Amazon’s calculations are misleading because the company doesn’t include emissions from third-party merchants that make up more than half of sales on Amazon’s digital store and relies too heavily on renewable energy purchases that don’t guarantee the company is shifting away from dirtier fuel sources, like fossil fuels.

“The Climate Pledge was a massive victory for workers and for the planet,” the group wrote in a statement. “But despite releasing a glowing sustainability report every year since then, Amazon is failing to meet its goals.”

Eliza Pan, a former Amazon employee who still works with the climate group, said Amazon had initially focused on “all the low-hanging fruit projects that it could. But now those are all done, and what we’re seeing is they’re not doing the hard stuff.”

Amazon disputed the activist employees’ findings. It said in a statement that the report “has incorrect findings and assumptions … based on data and opinion from outside the company.”

Carbon emissions

Amazon launched its Climate Pledge with grand ambitions to be carbon neutral more than 10 years ahead of the 2050 timeline scientists had said was necessary to stave off the worst impacts of global climate change. In Seattle, it bought the naming rights to an arena and used that to promote its Climate Pledge promise, rather than the company name.

But, the company’s carbon footprint has not yet dipped below 2019 levels, the first time it disclosed its carbon emissions.

In 2023, Amazon’s carbon emissions totaled 68.8 million metric tons, a 3% drop from the 2022 total of 70.7 million metric tons. In 2019, at the start of the Climate Pledge, Amazon’s emissions totaled 51.2 million metric tons.

The average carbon footprint for a person in the United States is 16 tons, according to The Nature Conservancy, an environmental advocacy organization. And that’s one of the highest rates in the world.

For the first three years after the Climate Pledge, Amazon’s carbon emissions increased by nearly 10 million metric tons. Emissions decreased for the first time between 2021 and 2022, by 0.4%.

Last year, most of Amazon’s emission reductions came from the purchase of renewable energy. But it also saw a decline in emissions from other indirect sources, like business travel, building construction and operating expenses, the sustainability report says.

Emissions directly from the company’s operations increased 7% year over year, according to the annual report.

Amazon says that’s due to transportation fuel and an increased use of its logistics services, rather than third-party delivery services. Emissions from those independent groups would be counted as indirect sources.

Aseem Prakash, a political science professor at the University of Washington who studies climate change and environmental politics, said he’d like to see more information about emissions from items sold on Amazon by third parties, as well as more details about what it means when companies sign on to the Climate Pledge.

“I think Amazon is a great climate leader,” Prakash said, “but it could also be important that they take leadership in appropriate disclosures.”

Renewable energy

Amazon has been the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for four years, and has invested in more than 500 solar and wind projects globally that together could generate enough energy to power the equivalent of 7.6 million U.S. homes, Amazon said in its annual report.

But Amazon is also driving up energy demand with its operations and data centers, compounding the need for more electricity as much of the world looks to shift away from fossil fuels.

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice said in its report that the company was overstating its renewable energy achievements because it relies heavily on the purchase of renewable energy to offset its use of fossil fuels and other “dirty” energy sources.

Amazon isn’t the only company that uses this tactic, and the funds from purchasing renewable energy could go toward the construction of even more clean energy sources. But, it hasn’t always worked the way it was intended.

A study from Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a group of stakeholders working to standardize how to measure greenhouse gases, found 42% of broad company commitments using Renewable Energy Credits, one type of offset, would not lead to a decrease in emissions.

Amazon said Renewable Energy Credits are not a core piece of its renewable energy strategy. It has purchased credits, but says that is only a temporary measure to bridge the gap as renewable energy projects are built.

“We’re proud of the work we’ve done to get here,” Kara Hurst, Amazon chief sustainability officer, said in a prepared statement. “We also know that this is just a moment in time, and our work to decarbonize our operations will not always be the same each year—we’ll continue to make progress, while also constantly evolving on our path to 2040.”

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice pushed back on Amazon’s progress, and accused the company of using “creative accounting” to inflate its numbers.

In areas where Amazon operates data centers, which guzzle up more and more energy to fuel the boom in artificial intelligence, the climate group estimated Amazon used only 22% renewable energy from local utilities. That means nearly 80% still came from other sources.

“I’ve learned to question everything on the surface,” said one current Amazon employee who is involved with AECJ and asked to remain anonymous to protect their job.

“Huge corporations like Amazon have such an ability to either very negatively or very positively impact the climate,” the Seattle-based worker said. “They’re so big that I feel like they have a responsibility to do so much better.”

‘Elephant in the room’

Much of Amazon’s sustainability report has been the same year to year, with direct emissions increasing, the purchase of renewable energy leading to a decline in indirect emissions and the company focusing on electric vans, plastic packaging and clean energy sources for its data centers.

This year, Amazon introduced a new hurdle toward reaching its 2040 net-zero goal: AI.

“The path is changing in ways that no one quite anticipated even just a few years ago—driven largely by the increasing demand for generative AI,” Amazon said in a news release. “This will require different sources of energy than we originally projected, so we’ll need to be nimble and continue evolving our approach.”

Prakash, the UW professor, said most large tech companies tackling AI are facing the same problem, including Google and Microsoft. He’s still waiting to see a good, comprehensive plan for how to tackle it.

“The new elephant in the room is AI,” he said.

While it plans to continue investing in renewable energy, Amazon said it is also exploring other carbon-free energy sources, including nuclear and other “emerging technologies that can help power our operations for decades to come.”

Amazon started to diversify its clean energy portfolio with nuclear power this year.

2024 The Seattle Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.