Amazon & Climate
We’re here today to urge Amazon to be a leader. The signs aren’t promising — from the company’s fight against funding for housing for the homeless, to its unwillingness to even disclose, let alone address, its climate impacts…Amazon’s management shows all the signs of people who think they’re not accountable to anyone but themselves.
Their distaste for commitment to the community hasn’t been uniform, though. In 2012, Bezos was asked for 100k to help in the fight for gay marriage…and gave 2.5 million.
Crucially, he didn’t give this money to companies that support gay rights to create islands of tolerance at those companies; he gave it to help change the laws of the state. That’s the difference between that gift, and his willingness to help support Mary’s Place but not to pay taxes so that the City can solve homelessness systematically.
If a thing is both wrong and a clear outgrowth of existing conditions — whether it’s discrimination or homelessness — then we need systemic solutions. Philanthropy can help bring those about, but it should never be mistaken for them.
There is no problem that cries out for systemic solutions more than climate change does. I even suspect Bezos agrees with that — and that it’s part of his rationale for not tackling emissions as a company. He probably thinks that until there’s an economy-wide carbon tax, nothing will really change, so why should he stick his neck out?
He should stick his neck out because we have a dangerous fool in the White House, dismantling every protection we have against the ravaging of the planet. It’s on all of us to step up, and most of all it’s on those whose enormous footprints mean that they could make a real difference.
Who better to begin to tackle shipping emissions than the company that more or less defines retail delivery? Amazon is practically an economy-wide impact by itself.
When someone who talks about going to Mars can’t be bothered to set his sights on transforming the energy use of his own company….it’s time to ask whether that’s ambition, or merely hubris. His kids’ lives don’t depend on Mars — not unless he’s already entirely given up on planet Earth, in which case there are several billion other kids I’d say he’s accountable to. All of us depend on a climate system stable enough to support human beings, and if Amazon and other big companies don’t start behaving like the rational actors we know very well our president is not, then we also know we won’t have that stable climate.
When Bezos gave the 2.5 million he told his former employee “This is right for so many reasons.”
We’re here today to tell him: local pollution and asthma, rising seas, falling crop yields…doing everything we can to stop fossil fuel use on the most ambitious possible timeline is right for so many reasons. Just ask the loved ones left behind by the several thousand people who died in Puerto Rico last fall. Ask the hundreds of thousands of migrants displaced from their homes due to climate change. Closer to home, just ask people who lost their homes in the wildfires, and oyster farmers moving operations to Hawaii, and the members of the Quinault tribe on the Olympic Peninsula, making plans to move their entire village up the hill due to rising seas.
Climate change is the greatest threat that has ever faced humanity, and we need to do all we can to focus on ending fossil fuel use now. The solutions are available, and business is on the hook just like we’re all on the hook. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, Jeff Bezos could personally buy three quarters of a million Tesla electric semi-trucks and still have more than a billion dollars left over for his family. The man who made that money creating and then fulfilling our every desire to buy stuff online and have it the next day could deploy it in service of our only common home. He could use his vaunted ambition for something that actually matters. With the stroke of a pen, he could change the world, and change both the economics and the politics of electrified transportation overnight.
Our organizational demand at the moment is simply that he disclose Amazon’s carbon footprint; pilot electric delivery in the fifteen most polluted US cities, including Seattle, in the next year and a half; and commit to carbon-free operations by 2030. But he could do those things in his sleep. Real ambition would be actually attempting to preserve a livable planet for his kids and ours, starting today. Real ambition would be recognizing that despite the fever dreams of some of his Silicon Valley peers, he and his customers are flesh-and-blood human beings who are entirely interdependent with a planet of immeasurable complexity and beauty — and if we preside over the rapid demise of that complexity and beauty, we are not only monsters, but fools.
Look around you, Jeff Bezos: your family, your friends, our green green mountains, the Sound, the lake. If you want to preserve any of this, then wake up.
(These were remarks from the 5/30/2018 Amazon AGM protest. Please sign this letter to Bezos, and check out 350 Seattle research here.)
