"Climate Pledge Arena"? Really, Amazon? That's The Plan?
On the same day last week that Amazon announced a $2 billion fund to bolster and develop low-carbon technologies, the company also quietly released its 2019 sustainability report. It showed that the total carbon emitted by the world’s largest online retailer actually increased by 15 percent compared to the previous year.
That timing raised a lot of eyebrows, and skeptics grew even warier on Thursday, when Amazon announced that it was christening a Seattle stadium the “Climate Pledge Arena,” named for the company’s recent plan to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. In order to inspire “global climate action,” a press release said, the venue would be outfitted with all-electric operations and an ice rink filled with reclaimed rainwater — making it “the greenest ice in the NHL.”
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To Genevieve Guenther, founder and director of the nonprofit End Climate Silence, this all amounts to “full-stop greenwashing.” “If you drill down into the language of the announcement,” she told Grist, “you get deeper and deeper reservoirs of bullshit.” One example is the way that Amazon calculated and presented its 2019 carbon footprint. In its sustainability report, Amazon attempts to justify its 15 percent emissions hike by pointing to a 22 percent sales increase, saying that because sales rose faster than emissions, the greenhouse gas associated with each dollar of production actually decreased 5 percent in 2019. Both Guenther and AECJ said that this focus on the so-called “carbon intensity” of Amazon’s operations distracts from its increasing emissions overall.
“Dollars are irrelevant to the health and sustainability of the planet,” AECJ tweeted. “‘Carbon intensity’ allows Amazon to prop its planet-harming profits up alongside its carbon emissions & claim the company is making relative progress.” Critics also noted that Amazon didn’t account for emissions stemming from the supply chain and manufacture of the products that it sells, except for items sold under the Amazon brand name. However, the company did include those non-Amazon products’ sales in its carbon intensity calculations. According to University of Washington professors Aseem Prakash and Nives Dolsak, this means that Amazon is inflating its estimate of the drop in carbon intensity while “grossly under-accounting” its net emissions.
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https://grist.org/climate/beyond-climate-pledge-arena-are-amazons-climate-goals-for-real/
