Amazon’s annual environmental report, which claims the company has achieved its goal of being 100% renewably powered ahead of schedule, has come under scrutiny from its own employees. The report stated that Amazon balanced out its electricity use with investments in renewable energy projects, resulting in a 28-gigawatt renewable energy capacity portfolio. However, a group of Amazon employees known as Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECH) has criticized the company’s reliance on investing in renewable projects to offset non-renewable energy use. AECH claims that Amazon’s renewable energy milestone was achieved through “creative accounting” and that the company’s operations are unsustainable.
The group’s report, Burns Trust: The Amazon unsustainability report, raises concerns about the actual percentage of renewable energy used by Amazon’s data centers in the US and questions the company’s commitment to sustainability. Additionally, IT sustainability experts, including Mark Butcher, have questioned the lack of detailed emissions breakdown for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the report. Butcher points out that the report lacks specific information on AWS’s greenhouse gas emissions and challenges the reliability and transparency of Amazon’s environmental data.
Amazon’s 2023 environmental report shows a decrease in total carbon emissions, with Scope 2 emissions seeing an 11% reduction. However, critics argue that Amazon’s reliance on market-based methods for calculating emissions does not provide an accurate picture of the company’s environmental impact. There are also concerns about the lack of Scope 3 emissions data available to AWS customers, despite promises to update the Customer Carbon Footprint Tracking Tool. Former AWS executive Adrian Cockcroft has expressed disappointment in the lack of progress on providing Scope 3 emissions data to customers, highlighting the need for transparency and accurate metrics in environmental reporting.
