Amazon pledges to tackle climate change head-on

[Shawn Knight]

What just happened? Amazon became the first company to sign The Climate Pledge, promising to measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis, implement decarbonization strategies and neutralize any remaining emissions to achieve net zero annual carbon emissions by 2040.

Amazon on Thursday partnered with Global Optimism to launch The Climate Pledge, a commitment to meet the requirements set forth in the Paris Agreement a full 10 years early.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said they are done being in the middle of the pack with regard to this issue. “We’ve decided to use our size and scale to make a difference,” he added.

Bezos promised that Amazon will reach 80 percent renewable energy by 2024 and 100 percent by 2030 en route to being net zero carbon by 2040.

To help achieve its goal, Amazon has ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans from automaker Rivian. The e-commerce giant said 10,000 of the new electric vehicles will be on the road making deliveries by 2022 with the entire fleet scheduled to be in commission by 2030. Amazon expects the vehicles to collectively save four million metric tons of carbon.

Amazon is also investing $100 million into the Right Now Climate Fund, a reforestation effort in partnership with The Nature Conservancy that aims to protect forests, wetlands and peatlands around the globe.

Sally Jewell, interim CEO of The Nature Conservancy, said “healthy forests, grasslands, and wetlands are some of the most effective tools we have to address climate change—but we must act now to take natural climate solutions to scale.”

Bezos said he has been talking with CEOs of other large companies and is finding a lot of interest. “If a company with as much physical infrastructure as Amazon—which delivers more than 10 billion items a year—can meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early, then any company can.”

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/81976-amazon-pledges-tackle-climate-change-head.html

 

[EClyde]

Tell him this: A groundbreaking study conducted by a team of researchers at Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research poured over data on debris from 79 sampling sites along 57 rivers and found that just a handful of rivers in a couple of countries account for an overwhelming majority of the pollutants piling up in our oceans.

“The 10 top-ranked rivers transport 88-95 percent of the global load into the sea,” Dr. Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist who headed up the study, told the Daily Mail after the research was published in 2017. “The rivers with the highest estimated plastic loads are characterized by high population – for instance the Yangtze with over half a billion people.”

The study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, said that by cutting plastic pollution in the Yangtze River — the third-longest in the world and located in China — and the Ganges River, located in India, ocean pollution could be reduced by half.

So what is he really going to do?

 

[yRaz]

.....So what is he really going to do?

Well I'm not him but it seems like he is encouraging other companies to do the same thing and there are businesses that operate in those regions. It would stand to reason that what he is doing is trying to convince those businesses to pollute less.

And just because YOU don't see what he can do does not mean he should stop trying. He could also hire a team of experts to come up with ideas he doesn't have himself.

Actually, there is quite a lot everyone can do.

 

[psycros]

.....So what is he really going to do?

Well I'm not him but it seems like he is encouraging other companies to do the same thing and there are businesses that operate in those regions. It would stand to reason that what he is doing is trying to convince those businesses to pollute less.

And just because YOU don't see what he can do does not mean he should stop trying. He could also hire a team of experts to come up with ideas he doesn't have himself.

Actually, there is quite a lot everyone can do.

China and India get HUGE exemptions from the Paris accords and all other global environmental agreements made in the past twenty years. Seems to me the best thing that could be done is to embargo, tariff and otherwise force the world's biggest polluters into toeing the same line as everyone else.

 

[yRaz]

China and India get HUGE exemptions from the Paris accords and all other global environmental agreements made in the past twenty years. Seems to me the best thing that could be done is to embargo, tariff and otherwise force the world's biggest polluters into toeing the same line as everyone else.

China is, surprisingly, doing a lot to reduce carbon emissions but still just dump toxic waste everywhere. India is a s**t show, nothing we can really do about that.

My opinion is that these things aren't going to come from governments but the private sector. Business that choose to go this route will have the option to NOT do business with companies or in countries that pollute a lot.

Governments will barely do anything. Typical responses of "it'll cost jobs" or something.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

China and India get HUGE exemptions from the Paris accords and all other global environmental agreements made in the past twenty years. Seems to me the best thing that could be done is to embargo, tariff and otherwise force the world's biggest polluters into toeing the same line as everyone else.

China is, surprisingly, doing a lot to reduce carbon emissions but still just dump toxic waste everywhere. India is a s**t show, nothing we can really do about that.

My opinion is that these things aren't going to come from governments but the private sector. Business that choose to go this route will have the option to NOT do business with companies or in countries that pollute a lot.

Governments will barely do anything. Typical responses of "it'll cost jobs" or something.

Indeed at the Governmental level China is doing infinitely more than that POS Trump and his malfeasant administration. However, I agree business will drive most innovation and do whatever it takes rather than wait for more inaction and moronic climate denying hysteria from the right wing lunatics. Already renewables are producing far cheaper energy that filthy coal and toxic nuclear, even in USA solar is down 3c/kWhr, in Saudi Arabia it's 2c/kwHr.

 

[rub900]

Great now pay your warehouse a decent wage. Also hire more people and stop working them until they drop. Until then bald boy can fall off a cliff.

 

[EClyde]

Indeed at the Governmental level China is doing infinitely more than that POS Trump and his malfeasant administration. However, I agree business will drive most innovation and do whatever it takes rather than wait for more inaction and moronic climate denying hysteria from the right wing lunatics. Already renewables are producing far cheaper energy that filthy coal and toxic nuclear, even in USA solar is down 3c/kWhr, in Saudi Arabia it's 2c/kwHr.

Trump is a great man you POS

 

[EClyde]

Well I'm not him but it seems like he is encouraging other companies to do the same thing and there are businesses that operate in those regions. It would stand to reason that what he is doing is trying to convince those businesses to pollute less.

And just because YOU don't see what he can do does not mean he should stop trying. He could also hire a team of experts to come up with ideas he doesn't have himself.

Actually, there is quite a lot everyone can do.

Let's all make posters

 

[JaredTheDragon]

Just more marketing hype - probably funded and fueled by investments in these electric vehicle companies to begin with. AGW has always been an absolute farce, scientifically. These guys can't even diagram carbon, much less oxygen or the molecule - or even hydrogen and helium - and they want us to believe it's the enemy? Just preposterous.

 

[fadingfool]

China and India get HUGE exemptions from the Paris accords and all other global environmental agreements made in the past twenty years. Seems to me the best thing that could be done is to embargo, tariff and otherwise force the world's biggest polluters into toeing the same line as everyone else.

China is, surprisingly, doing a lot to reduce carbon emissions but still just dump toxic waste everywhere. India is a s**t show, nothing we can really do about that.

My opinion is that these things aren't going to come from governments but the private sector. Business that choose to go this route will have the option to NOT do business with companies or in countries that pollute a lot.

Governments will barely do anything. Typical responses of "it'll cost jobs" or something.

Indeed at the Governmental level China is doing infinitely more than that POS Trump and his malfeasant administration. However, I agree business will drive most innovation and do whatever it takes rather than wait for more inaction and moronic climate denying hysteria from the right wing lunatics. Already renewables are producing far cheaper energy that filthy coal and toxic nuclear, even in USA solar is down 3c/kWhr, in Saudi Arabia it's 2c/kwHr.

Erm if you actually check CO2 emissions the USA has reduced their emissions remarkably (even beating the Kyoto accords which they never signed up to) just by switching to gas from coal. This may be inspite of the current Whitehouse incumbant but China has more than made up this reduction with their huge increases (and expected increases until at least 2030) in CO2 emissions. The atmosphere doesn't care where the CO2 comes from so check the actual figures before you end up looking foolish.

 

[Markoni35]

Again propaganda in action. Why did they list China first, when the stats show river Indus (shared by India and Pakistan) is the most polluted by plastic? They mentioned China several times before even adding India to the story, while Pakistan wasn't mentioned at all.

And if we count the most polluted river in general, that one is in Indonesia. Why are journalists behaving as if internet doesn't exist and we can't check the facts?