Amazon Gives Up a Key Part of Its Climate Pledge, Deletes Blog Post That Announced 'Shipment Zero Initiative' (businessinsider.com) 45
According to investigative reporter Will Evans, Amazon recently backed out of a commitment to make 50% of its shipments net-zero carbon by 2030. "Amazon said (PDF) in a statement that it would roll this goal into a broader Climate Pledge to reach net-zero carbon across all its operations by 2040," reports Insider. "That's a decade later than the 50% goal, which was called 'Shipment Zero' at the time." From the report: "As we examined our work toward The Climate Pledge, we realized that it no longer made sense to have a separate and more narrow Shipment Zero goal that applied to only one part of our business, so we've decided to eliminate it," Amazon wrote in the statement.
The investigative reporter Will Evans squeezed this information from Amazon and tweeted about it Thursday. Last year, Evans uncovered a study that said the company had drastically undercounted its carbon footprint. At the time, an Amazon spokesman reiterated the company's commitment to cutting emissions, including ordering a fleet of electric delivery vans and buying renewable energy for its electricity needs.
Dropping the specific shipment pledge is noteworthy because Amazon's ecommerce operation relies on vast fleets of vehicles and aircraft to deliver packages to consumers quickly. Most of this activity chews up vast quantities of fossil fuels and spews out greenhouse gases. However, fast delivery is a key selling point for shoppers and the main reason millions subscribe to the company's Prime program. Amazon announced the Shipment Zero initiative in a blog a few years ago. The company has since deleted the post. However, through the magic of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, large corporations cannot rewrite online history. Here's a version of the blog.
The investigative reporter Will Evans squeezed this information from Amazon and tweeted about it Thursday. Last year, Evans uncovered a study that said the company had drastically undercounted its carbon footprint. At the time, an Amazon spokesman reiterated the company's commitment to cutting emissions, including ordering a fleet of electric delivery vans and buying renewable energy for its electricity needs.
Dropping the specific shipment pledge is noteworthy because Amazon's ecommerce operation relies on vast fleets of vehicles and aircraft to deliver packages to consumers quickly. Most of this activity chews up vast quantities of fossil fuels and spews out greenhouse gases. However, fast delivery is a key selling point for shoppers and the main reason millions subscribe to the company's Prime program. Amazon announced the Shipment Zero initiative in a blog a few years ago. The company has since deleted the post. However, through the magic of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, large corporations cannot rewrite online history. Here's a version of the blog.
They never cared. (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazon switched from shipping products in recyclable cardboard boxes to shipping stuff in padded plastic mailers, and then tried to claim it was better for the environment because they were smaller. In theory they have padded paper mailers, but they only seem to use those like 10% of the time, the rest of the time it's shipped in the plastic mailers.
Re: They never cared. (Score:3)
You know that padding is plastic, right?
At least they got rid of the foam pellets. Those things were so fucking messy.
Re: They never cared. (Score:4, Informative)
The padding in the boxes, you mean? It was air-filled bags of very thin plastic, far less plastic involved than in the 100% plastic padded mailers.
I've switched to bio-degradable packing peanuts for stuff that I ship. Doesn't seem to cost any more than polystyrene peanuts, and I don't know if they're more or less energy intensive to produce, but at least they're not going to leave eternal plastic waste or microplastics around behind.
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They are actually edible.
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I've switched to bio-degradable packing peanuts for stuff that I ship.
I appreciate that you're trying, but I hate these. They're better than the styrene peanuts, sure, and in principle you can melt them in a bathtub to get rid of them. I have tried to make this work many times. In practice, they melt so poorly that I've given up and they just wind up in a landfill like the styrene ones. The only packing material which doesn't wind up in a landfill is paper, which I can recycle instead.
That could be my bathtub, which is not the standard oval and doesn't concentrate the wate
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You're not supposed to try to biodegrade them yourself, they're *supposed* to wind up in the landfill, where water and moisture will dissolve them into the ground naturally. That's the whole point. You throw them in the trash and they're not going to live forever in the landfill like polystyrene ones.
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Which is pretty much exactly my assumption about most 'achieve by ' in almost any context. It's a way to 'commit' to a goal so far in the future as to not actuallly mean anything.
This goes for financial results of companies, environmental targets, technology advancement, really any goal that can sound good but is infeasible or would actually be controversial in a real attempt.
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So maybe a 33% best-case emissions reduction if you convert the whole fleet, and likely less than that.
That's interesting if true. I recall switching from diesel to natural gas as a fuel for trucks can also bring a 33% or so reduction in CO2.
Converting a diesel truck to natural gas is not trivial, natural gas doesn't work well in compression ignition engines. Then comes the logistics issue of natural gas not always being available. The solution to this is a "dual-fuel" engine, as opposed to "bi-fuel". Dual fuel engines need two fuels to run, and a bi-fuel engine can run on one fuel or another. A diesel
Going "zero carbon" is hard if science is ignored. (Score:2)
My guess is that a good sized chunk of Amazon's customer based aren't yet on board with support for nuclear fission power. There's no getting to "zero carbon" on only wind, water, and sun. Nuclear fission needs to be in that mix. So, rather than make a pledge to support nuclear fission in their goal to "zero carbon" they move the goalposts.
There is no energy source that gets to zero carbon, that is why the quotes around "zero carbon". Of all the energy sources available to us today the closest to zero c
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PV + Hydrogen can do it. It requires a large degree of mobilisation of labour and economic output, but it can be done purely from a resource point of view.
At a guess I'd say it requires mobilisation somewhere between the moonshot and the world war. Whether this can be done from a political point of view is a different matter.
Re:Going "zero carbon" is hard if science is ignor (Score:4, Informative)
PV + Hydrogen can do it.
No, it can not.
Look at the second graphic on this web page: https://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/... [blogspot.com]
That is a chart built using data from the UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY showing how solar power is highly resource intensive. I emphasized the source of that data because previous uses of the link tends to get "a just home rando's blog" response. Ignore the blog if that bothers you, look at the chart. I'd use a different link but this is a link I can easily find and shows the data very nicely. If the data looks like bullshit then find some other source that makes the same comparison. I'd think it difficult to call this data bullshit if nobody can come up with better data. It's not like the US DOE is full of nuclear industry shills, it seems quite the opposite is true.
Then comes hydrogen. Hydrogen is very difficult to deal with. So difficult that even rocket scientists don't like to deal with it. As an energy storage medium it is very inefficient, perhaps with the exception of burning it in a rocket. One common way to deal with the difficulty of hydrogen is to bind the hydrogen chemically to something else. Something like nitrogen for ammonia or such. Or bind the hydrogen with carbon to make, well... hydrocarbons. Once the hydrogen is in a hydrocarbon then we'd just burn the hydrocarbon in an internal combustion engine for transportation. That includes transportation to space. Amazon is, or was, planning on replacing their hydrocarbon burning vehicles with electric. If hydrogen is the fuel of the future then electric vehicles is not the way to go. Perhaps the way to go is natural gas vehicles. With natural gas instead of diesel fuel or gasoline there's an immediate drop of CO2 emissions, and less of other unwanted emissions like sulfur. Then moving to synthesized methane is just a matter of switching the fuel, not making any modifications to the vehicle. Oh, and there's experiments with "dissolving" hydrogen in natural gas as a fuel. Somehow the mix of hydrogen and methane keeps the hydrogen from eroding away the insides of metal tanks.
Solar PV is a very bad idea as a means to replace fossil fuels. Hydrogen as a fossil fuel replacement is also a bad idea. If there's evidence to suggest otherwise then I'd like to see it. It's not that solar PV can not produce energy, it is that compared to other options solar PV looks bad. Hydrogen is certainly a means to store energy, only we know of better options.
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In a net zero renewable situation all the furnaces in the glass and polysilicon factories run on hydrogen and all the mines and transport are electrified or run on hydrogen ... and all the electricity and hydrogen comes from PV+wind. Yes, there are continuing emissions on the road to net zero, no that's not relevant.
Using emission numbers from within the current context of production and declaring them static as the context changes is dishonest, stupid or naive.
Re:Going "zero carbon" is hard if science is ignor (Score:4, Informative)
Using emission numbers from within the current context of production and declaring them static as the context changes is dishonest, stupid or naive.
Nobody is claiming these numbers are static, only that is where we are starting from today. If we assume it take one year to mine the raw materials needed for X amount of energy production by solar power then by the US DOE study it would take a month, week, perhaps even as little as a day, to get the material for X amount of energy from nuclear fission. We don't have unlimited resources to draw from so we should apply the resources we have in the most efficient matter possible. We can assume improvements in solar power in raw material use, but also improvements in nuclear fission. Those numbers are not static, remember that?
Running vehicles from hydrogen is nonsense when we know how to synthesize hydrocarbons. This is a process developed in the 1940s, and while not used for fuel we synthesize hydrocarbons all the time for lubricants. You believe switching to hydrogen fuels will be faster than moving to synthesized hydrocarbons? I agree that production of hydrogen is in the future of our energy plan, but the hydrogen will be used to make hydrocarbon fuels. We'd do that so we don't have to make some massive switch in our fuel transport infrastructure. By not having to make that change that saves us plenty on time, labor, and raw materials.
Wind and solar will be used for energy production but they will play a secondary role to nuclear fission and hydro. That's quite clear from studies done on our energy options. If you want to be convincing then provide some sources. I gave one earlier, and I believe it a good one since it is well written and cites credible primary sources.
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I believe hydrogen can be all over the place any way as a storage medium and as the cheapest industrial gas for furnaces and reduction. CO2 and synthesis costs money and industry generally has the scale and volume to deal with the problems of hydrogen, they aren't going to pay for synthesised methane except where necessary to run old equipment.
Once industry uses it and there is a vast storage and distribution network, it becomes tempting to use it in other niches. Power generation would bring down the cost
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I have been on trains running on biodiesel and on hydrogen power cells. The latter is far quieter and doesn't stink.
Maybe Zero carbon is the wrong goal (Score:2)
So yeah, let's drop coal and oil-fired plants in favor of natural gas, build solar and wind generation as fast as the grid can absorb i
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Stop pushing your lies. You have no honor, decency or facts. Nuclear is far too expensive, far too slow to build and far too unreliable (see France).
Entirely expected (Score:5, Insightful)
Any "pledge" that has no penalty nor enforcement is empty worthless words, just like "Don't be evil". It is just free PR to fool gullible people in buying their stuff.
A for-profit company turn its back on such an empty pledge when it hits their bottomline? Shocking!
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Turns out the upkeep on a half billion dollar yacht is more than Bezos budgeted. Better tighten the spending. https://people.com/human-inter... [people.com]
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This, while maybe too blunt for some, is the most insightful comment we're going to get. Keep an eye out for all kinds of companies, including some that had high scores for social and environmental consciousness to slink back into regressive behavior as profits dip and trends shift. Let's start by getting working caregivers pointlessly back on the road to the office, for instance. Cough, cough too much cigar smoke wafting out of the board room. Did I just see a young woman taking coffee in there and then
About as good as China's 2030 and 2060 promises (Score:1)
Lets all just go shopping again (Score:3)
I'm sure driving down town to pick up a couple kg worth of goods will use up less than the "vast quantities of fossil fuels" Amazon vans do completely loaded down.
Or wait, I have an even better idea, let Apple start a fully electrified delivery service which costs twice as much for delivery. Then you can look down on Amazon and the plebs from the ivory tower of wealth and greenwashed consumerism.
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There are no Amazon vans here, they use UPS or the post office, depending on how big the shipment is. And since those vehicles are driving around anyway, they won't burn any more fuel than was being burned before.
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There are no Amazon vans here, they use UPS or the post office, depending on how big the shipment is. And since those vehicles are driving around anyway, they won't burn any more fuel than was being burned before.
The Post Office are working hard to move to EVs: https://www.reuters.com/market... [reuters.com]
Priorities (Score:2)
Technically, Amazon decided to use other methods to satisfy The Climate Pledge instead of improving its most wasteful service. As carbon-costs become easier to calculate, a lot of corporations (predominately US-owned) will be cancelling their "carbon zero" or "carbon neutral" promise.
Saving the world through dodgy accounting (Score:2, Informative)
I work for a major oil company and my wife for a consultant who does among other things emission accounting work. Undercounting / miss reporting emissions is the norm. My own company recently published a report internally patting themselves on the back for their CO2 and Methane reductions, praising themselves as they are on track to meet the company goals if you take the last two measurements and draw a linear extrapolation to zero (as if that's how it works).
The emission reductions? 90% came from asset div
Stop expecting moral behavior (Score:4, Insightful)
We have rules and government and the vote for a reason.
Tomorrow!, tomorrow! ... (Score:3)
Relevant to the recent Verra woes? (Score:3)
When the biggest name in 'carbon offsets' appears to be a complete fraud, it takes that option out of the running to claim 'net zero' by buying indulgences... err... 'carbon offsets'.
Lots of 'net zero' promises bank on tossing some money at carbon offsets to claim 'victory', but it seems likely that carbon offsets will now earn the skepticism the concept rightfully deserves. Need real measures rather than accounting tricks to make a difference.
Cutting emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
I am getting really sick of people calling electric cars "zero emissions" and companies using them to demonstrate their commitment to "cutting emissions." It's just moving the tailpipe to the local coal fired plant until we fix the way we generate electricity. EVs are a stepping stone in a systemic plan, not a solution. Marketing spin is not going to fix this, and people should not feel better - not one bit - about driving an EV unless they've also installed solar at their house to charge it. Then you've reduced emissions.
Businesses should not be able to claim "less carbon" by shifting their emissions to other businesses (It's not Amazon generating emissions, it's the energy company!). Energy is a network, not a series of local emitters. Emissions are fungible and it's far too tempting to shift the cost somewhere else and declare it SEP. Another industry. A poorer neighborhood. Net carbon is what matters.
Conserve energy. Reduce usage. Move the grid to renewables and probably nuclear as a stop gap. Fix the problem, please, not the optics. We're doing less than nothing right now - coal is worse than gasoline - and patting ourselves on the back for it.
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I am getting really sick of people calling electric cars "zero emissions" and companies using them to demonstrate their commitment to "cutting emissions." It's just moving the tailpipe to the local coal fired plant until we fix the way we generate electricity. EVs are a stepping stone in a systemic plan, not a solution. Marketing spin is not going to fix this, and people should not feel better - not one bit - about driving an EV unless they've also installed solar at their house to charge it. Then you've reduced emissions.
Um ... no.
Electricity produced at the coal plant is more efficient than burning stuff in a little engine in your car. It's not zero emissions, certainly. But it is less emission.
net zero (Score:2)
Net zero is just a euphemism for paying climate grifters for the privilege of doing anything that requires energy, which means anything at all.
Pledge, promise, guarantee... (Score:2)
Cue the moral outrage (Score:2)
Amazon most likely realized that meeting this goal wasn't possible without severely impacting their customers to whom the cost would be passed on.
It baffles me that people are both surprised and pissed off about this. Sorry, but you should have seen this coming a long way off. Reality is a bitter pill to swallow.