Business Insider reports that Amazon has decided to back out “of a commitment to make 50% of its shipments net-zero carbon by 2030. Amazon said in a statement that it would roll this goal into a broader Climate Pledge to reach net-zero carbon across all its operations by 2040. That’s a decade later than the 50% goal, which was called ‘Shipment Zero’ at the time.
“‘As we examined our work toward The Climate Pledge, we realized that it no longer made sense to have a separate and more narrow Shipment Zero goal that applied to only one part of our business, so we’ve decided to eliminate it,’ Amazon wrote in the statement.”
The Business Insider story points out that the bog posting that Amazon used to announce the Shipment Zero initiative has now been deleted, making moot statements such as “we can now see a path to net zero carbon delivery of shipments to customers, and we are setting an ambitious goal for ourselves to reach 50% of all Amazon shipments with net zero carbon by 2030.”
KC’s View:
To be fair, at the time Amazon also acknowledged that “it won’t be easy to achieve this goal, but it’s worth being focused and stubborn on this vision and we’re committed to seeing it through.”
As it ends up, not quite committed enough. I can’t help but wonder when the broader 2040 will bite the dust and/or be extended to 2050 or beyond.
I don’t doubt that Amazon wants to reduce its carbon footprint. But the cold reality is that it operates a carbon-intensive business, and it is not going to dilute its business model in the pursuit of less carbon usage.
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