NY Times: Amazon Accelerates Efforts to Fight Climate Change

Published September, 2019

By David McCabe

WASHINGTON — Amazon committed on Thursday to meeting the goals of the Paris climate agreement 10 years ahead of schedule and be carbon neutral by 2040, in the company’s most ambitious push yet to combat climate change.

Jeff Bezos, the company’s chief executive, said that the promises were part of a new effort called the Climate Pledge. Amazon is the first company to join the pledge.

To help meet its goal, Mr. Bezos said Amazon was ordering 100,000 electric delivery trucks from Rivian, a Michigan-based company that Amazon invested in this year.

Mr. Bezos said that climate change had outpaced even the serious predictions the scientific community made five years ago.

“Those predictions were bad but what is actually happening is dire,” he said.

Thursday’s announcement comes a day before more that 1,500 Amazon employees had planned to walk out of work, in an escalation of almost a year of pressuring Amazon to be more aggressive in its climate goals. The walkout is in conjunction with a day of planned climate strikes around the world.

They pushed Amazon on three issues: That the company have zero emissions by 2030, that it stop offering custom cloud-computing services that help the oil and gas industry find and extract more fossil fuels, and that it stop giving campaign donations to politicians who deny climate change is happening.

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