Amazon has backtracked on a key climate goal, eliminating its Shipment Zero pledge to be net-zero carbon across its shipments by 2030.
Spotted by Business Insider, Amazon has issued a statement consolidating its various climate pledges. As part of that consolidation, it has dumped its 2030 goal for net-zero carbon on 50% of its shipments, bundling it in with the company’s broader climate goals slated for 2040.
The company’s statement explained its decision:
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. We set Shipment Zero as a goal before we announced our commitment to The Climate Pledge, which is a more comprehensive effort to drive innovation and decarbonization efforts across our entire business. We remain focused on The Climate Pledge and our goal to reach netzero carbon across our operations by 2040—this includes working towards powering our operations with 100% renewable energy, transforming and decarbonizing our transportation network with electric vehicles and alternative fuels, using more sustainable building materials, and reducing packaging waste, among other areas.
The company has deleted the blog post announcing its original plans, but as Insider points out, it can still be accessed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Amazon’s wording is quite interesting, and shows just how much the company is backtracking (emphasis ours):
With improvements in electric vehicles, aviation bio fuels, reusable packaging, and renewable energy, for the first time 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. We are calling this project “Shipment Zero” – 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.
Part of Amazon’s change of heart likely has to do with the task being far bigger than it originally thought, with the company evidently ‘drastically undercounting its carbon footprint.’
To be clear: Amazon is pollutes far more than it originally thought AND it is now backtracking on its pledge to reduce that pollution.
