Amazon claimed on Wednesday that it has achieved its goal of getting all of its energy from clean energy sources in the past year. If taken at face value, the announcement would mean it has reached a milestone seven years ahead of its time, this would be a monumental achievement. But environmental experts speak The New York Timesincluding a group of concerned Amazon employees, warning that the company is “deceiving the public by distorting the truth.”
The company’s claim to achieve 100 percent clean electricity is based in part on investments of more than $500 billion. solar and wind initiatives. The company’s logic is that the energy produced by these projects is equal to the electricity consumed by its data centers, that is, even Steven.
But the renewable energy sources it uses for these calculations feed into the overall power grid, not just Amazon’s operations. Environmental experts warn that the company is using accounting and marketing to make itself look good. The New York Times put
“Amazon wants us to think of its data centers as surrounded by wind and solar farms,” Amazon Employees for Climate Justice wrote in a statement. NYT. “[But] the reality is that the company is investing heavily in data center expansion backed by West Virginia coal, Saudi Arabian oil and Canadian gas.
Clean energy experts say Amazon’s inclusion of renewable energy certificates (RECs) in its calculations can be very misleading. This is because if any power plant on a grid burns fossil fuels, businesses cannot know that the grid is using only clean energy. This was reported by the Amazon working group The New York Times after deducting the company’s use of RECs in its calculations, its investment in clean energy was “only a fraction of what was disclosed.”
“Buying a bunch of RECs doesn’t help anything,” said Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental policy at the University of Santa Barbara. NYT. “You just have to invest in real projects.”
To be fair, any move towards clean energy should be applauded. Amazon still received a “B” grade from the nonprofit CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), which was lower than the “A” grades of Google and Microsoft, but still a passing grade. The problem arises when companies use more marketing and PR related smoke and mirrors to convince them that they are doing more for the environment than they really are.
“The company should actually describe, what sources do you consider in this calculation?” This was reported by CDP director Simon Fishweicher NYT.
With The meteoric rise of AI and financial pressures to compete in this the new gold rush, companies are now shuffling their decks and finding new ways to meet their climate goals. However, this shakeup offers less material movement and more confusing words and sketchy logicthen the purported solutions create a new problem on top of it a real crisis.
