On Wednesday, amazon said it had met its goal of sourcing all of its energy from clean energy sources over the past year. If taken at face value, the announcement would mean it had reached the milestone. seven years ahead of schedule, which would be a monumental achievement. But amazon-clean-energy-climate-change.html” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank” data-ylk=”slk:environmental experts speaking to;elm:context_link;elmt:doNotAffiliate;cpos:1;pos:1;itc:0;sec:content-canvas”>Environmental experts speaking with The New York Timesincluding a group of concerned amazon employees, warn that the company is “misleading the public by distorting the truth.”
The company’s claim that it has achieved 100 percent clean electricity is based in part on billions of dollars in investments in more than 500 solar and wind projects. The company’s logic is that the energy these projects generate is equivalent to the electricity its data centers consume, so Steven is, too.
But the renewable energy sources it uses for those calculations feed into a general power grid, not just into amazon's operations. Environmental experts warn that the company is using “accounting and marketing to make itself look good,” as The New York Times Put it on.
“amazon wants us to think of its data centers as if they were surrounded by wind and solar farms,” the group amazon Employees for Climate Justice wrote in a statement to The NYT“But the reality is that the company is investing heavily in data center expansions fueled by West Virginia coal, Saudi Arabian oil and fracked gas in Canada.”
Clean energy experts say amazon's inclusion of renewable energy certificates (RECs) in its calculations can be highly misleading. That's because if any power plants on a grid burn fossil fuels, companies can't know that the grid uses only clean energy. The amazon employee group said The New York Times that after subtracting the company’s use of RECs from its calculations, its investment in clean energy was “only a fraction of what was published.”
“Buying a bunch of RECs doesn’t help at all,” said Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental policy at UC Santa Barbara. The NYT“You only have to invest in real projects.”
To be fair, any move toward clean energy should be applauded. amazon received a “B” grade from the nonprofit CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), which was lower than Google and Microsoft’s “A” ratings, but still a passing grade. The problem arises when companies use the smoke and mirrors more often associated with marketing and PR to mislead the public into believing they are doing more for the environment than they actually are.
“A company needs to describe in detail which sources are taken into account in that calculation,” said Simon Fischweicher, director of CDP. The NYT.
With the meteoric rise of ai and the financial pressures to compete in this new gold rush, companies are retooling their strategies and finding new ways to meet their climate goals. However, if that retooling offers less tangible movement and more equivocal words and imprecise logic, then that is creating a new problem that adds to their supposed solutions to a genuine crisis.
