Amazon’s greenhouse fuel emissions ballooned huge time final yr regardless of the corporate’s efforts to promote itself as a frontrunner in local weather motion. Its carbon dioxide emissions grew an eye-popping 18 % in 2021 in comparison with 2020, in response to its newest sustainability report.
Amazon generated 71.54 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equal final yr, about as a lot air pollution as 180 gas-fired energy crops may pump out yearly. That is the second yr in a row that Amazon’s local weather air pollution has grown by double digits because it made a splashy local weather pledge and began reporting its emissions publicly in 2019. Evaluating that yr to 2021, the corporate’s CO2 air pollution has really grown a whopping 40 %.
Again in 2019, then-CEO Jeff Bezos introduced that the corporate deliberate to succeed in net-zero carbon dioxide emissions for its operations by 2040. Sadly, that sort of pledge permits corporations to get away with some deceptive carbon accounting. They’ll intention to succeed in “net-zero” emissions or declare to be “carbon-neutral” by buying carbon offsets which can be purported to cancel out the affect of their emissions by supposedly eco-friendly tasks. That normally entails planting bushes, defending forests, or selling clear vitality. These offsets, nonetheless, usually do not end in real-world reductions within the planet-heating CO2 increase in our environment.
Amazon co-founded an initiative known as the “Local weather Pledge” in 2019 to recruit different companies to make comparable commitments to cut back CO2 and “neutralize” leftover emissions with “credible” offsets. However a significant affect on the local weather solely comes from an organization eliminating the overwhelming majority of its air pollution, if not eliminating all of its emissions.
Amazon is not setting instance of that — regardless of the corporate’s finest PR efforts. To take the warmth off its rising absolute carbon emissions, Amazon factors to a extra flattering quantity in its sustainability report. “The main focus shouldn’t be solely on an organization’s carbon footprint when it comes to absolute carbon emissions, but additionally on whether or not it’s decreasing its carbon depth,” the report says.
Amazon says it lowered its “carbon depth” by a small determine — 1.9 % — that means the emissions they produce for each greenback of merchandise offered fell barely. However this metric can be deceptive as a result of these reductions in carbon depth are simply worn out when the corporate’s enterprise grows.
That is precisely what’s occurred at Amazon. “As we work to decarbonize our firm, Amazon is rising quickly. We now have scaled our enterprise at an unprecedented tempo to assist meet the wants of our clients by the pandemic,” the corporate says in its sustainability report. In different phrases, Amazon made a killing in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic as e-commerce surged — and Amazon’s air pollution grew together with its income.
This all goes to indicate why it’s essential to have a look at an organization’s total carbon footprint to see if it’s really decreasing emissions general. To make issues worse, the figures Amazon stories are probably an undercount of how a lot air pollution the e-commerce big is really answerable for as a result of — not like another corporations, together with Goal — Amazon doesn’t embrace the emissions that come from making lots of the merchandise it sells.
And whereas preserving observe of carbon dioxide emissions is essential for tackling the local weather disaster that is supercharging devastating heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and different disasters — it would not seize the total spectrum of issues related to Amazon’s mushrooming warehouses and all these smiley-faced diesel vans making deliveries. For years, many communities the place Amazon builds warehouses have known as the corporate out for bringing extra smog, soot, and noise to their neighborhoods. This newest report exhibits that Amazon nonetheless has an extended strategy to go to forestall the entire air pollution it creates.
