Amazon Employees for Climate Justice is calling out the tech giant for what it says are misleading claims about its use of renewable energy.
greenwashing go brrr
This is no surprise, they’ve been one of the dirtiest cloud providers for years.
First off there’s no such thing as 100% clean or renewable power. Solar panels are metals (mined with petroleum powered equipment and probably refined in China using coal) plus petroleum products (plastics etc). They’re shipped around on trucks and boats, and if they’re burnt to remove the petrolium products before extracting the metals when they’re ‘recyced’ then it’s literally burning fossil fuels.
Not only that but they’re buying RECs. The power they’re consuming could very well be 100% generated by coal, but they gave a few bucks to somebody who had solar or wind.
John Oliver did a report on the tree planting scam these cooperations were running. Spoiler, they didn’t plant trees.
The employee group argues that the company should follow the approach that Google takes. Google aims to use carbon-free energy, 24/7, on every grid where it operates.
Good guy Google 🙃
