The following editorial originally appeared in The Seattle Times:
If Amazon delivers on time — for Prime members and the rest of the planet — with its pledge of carbon neutrality by 2040, the tech colossus will have found its way to another top-tier position.
The company that upended retail, pioneered internet business and colonized South Lake Union appears fully dialed-in on an ambitious climate-change initiative. The projects Jeff Bezos mapped last week, including renewable energy, reforestation and electric transportation, carry transformative promise for the company’s immense carbon footprint, and for the constellation of businesses Amazon influences.
Bezos intends to cut greenhouse-gas emissions of 44.4 million metric tons in 2018 to a net of zero. Amazon stands to benefit in multiple ways, not least in how future generations of recruited employees and government regulators regard the company.
The problem is what happens if he cannot get there, or decides that progress is too unsteady to disclose. The huge company is not a government. It will face no democratic reckoning if it fails. Transparency will be a corporate decision.
Regulators have failed their duty to create global pollution disclosure requirements, leaving Amazon and other titans of commerce free to set their own terms and timelines. Earth’s climate problem is too immense for an audience of billions to go on faith that companies are working things out just fine.
There is no guarantee climate will endure as a paramount interest of Amazon leaders for the next 21 years, even if Bezos — who will turn 76 in 2040 — remains at the helm the entire time.
Sustaining openness
Consider Amazon’s 2014 pledge to convert its Amazon Web Services business — the data structures behind much of “cloud computing” — to 100 percent renewable energy. A Greenpeace study in February spotlighted the uneven progress toward this goal. Amazon’s website hosts a timeline to explain the progress toward AWS energy sustainability, but it is sparsely updated.
Long-term corporate projects are vulnerable to shifting business needs. An absence of external accountability leaves business leaders free to focus on the distressing state of Earth’s climate intermittently, if at all. Across 22 years of annual letters to Amazon shareholders, Bezos has written nearly 41,000 words about his vision for the company. The word “carbon” has been used precisely once, in 2017. The word “climate” hasn’t come up.
It’s wonderful that Amazon has found religion about the precipitous acceleration of carbon emissions. The world rewarded Bezos for his visionary business acumen. His commitment to repay this by helping slow the damage from greenhouse gases deserves praise and attention.
This promise also requires sustained openness. No return policy can be invoked if the description does not match what arrives.
