On Wednesday, Amazon claimed it had met its goal of sourcing all of its electricity from clean energy sources last year. If taken at face value, the announcement suggests it has reached that milestone. seven years Ahead of schedule, it would be a monumental achievement. But Environmental experts speak The New York TimesConcerned people, including Amazon employees, have warned that the company is “misleading the public by distorting the truth.”
The company’s claim to achieve 100% clean electricity is based in part on billions of dollars of investment in more than 500 solar and wind initiatives. The company’s logic is that the energy generated by these projects is equivalent to the electricity consumed by its data centers. So is Steven.
But the renewable energy sources used in these calculations are not limited to Amazon’s operations, they feed into the general power grid. Environmental experts warn that the company is “using accounting and marketing to make itself look good.” The New York Times Put it in.
“Amazon wants us to think that its data centers are surrounded by wind and solar farms,” the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice wrote in a statement. The New York Times. “[But] The reality is that companies are investing heavily in data center expansion fueled by West Virginia coal, Saudi Arabian oil and Canadian fracked gas.”
Clean energy experts say Amazon’s inclusion of renewable energy certificates (RECs) in its calculations can be very misleading, because if the power plants on its grid burn fossil fuels, the company has no way of knowing that its grid is powered only by clean energy. The Amazon employee group The New York Times After factoring out the company’s REC use, the clean energy investments were “only a fraction of what was disclosed,” it said.
“Buying a lot of RECs doesn’t help,” said Leah Stokes, an assistant professor of environmental politics at UC Santa Barbara. The New York Times. “You 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 the “A” grades of Google and Microsoft, but still a passing grade. The problem comes when companies use smokescreens and mirrors, more often associated with marketing and PR, to make the public believe they are doing more for the environment than they really are.
“Companies need to explain what sources they actually include in their calculations,” said Simon Fischweicher, CDP’s director. The New York Times.
With the rapid rise of AI and the financial pressure to compete in this new gold rush, companies are now reshuffling the deck and looking for new ways to meet climate goals. But if that upheaval delivers less concrete moves and more sly rhetoric and murky logic, it’s creating new problems on top of the alleged solutions to a real crisis.
