Amazon: Carbon emissions from our Australian bit barns aren't for public viewing | Hacker News Reader

Amazon: Carbon emissions from our Australian bit barns aren't for public viewing

theregister.co.uk

73 pointsbenologist24 comments

The fact a corp can not disclose its carbon footprint in 2019 demonstrates how far behind we are in legislation. It’s just a huge sad tragedy of the commons.

How can it? Using what standard? America's? Australia's? Where do you even get the impression they should have to and that it's so out of this world that they don't "have to"?

Amazon is supposed to abide by the laws of any country they operate in. The law in Australia says that they need to disclose energy use and that those numbers are made public. If Amazon doesn’t want to follow Australian laws, perhaps they shouldn’t be putting bit barns in Australia.

"Section 25 of the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007 (NGER Act) permits corporations to apply to have information withheld from publication."

I actually RTFA.

It appears that they are acting within the law for this request.

"Section 25 of the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007 (NGER Act) permits corporations to apply to have information withheld from publication. Pending finalisation of their application to withhold their corporate emissions and energy data from publication, Amazon Corporate Services Pty Ltd's data is withheld from publication"

They will probably be denied the request.

It's not very important at this point which reporting system is used, be it EPA's GHGRP or an alternative. Ideally, we would have had a global agreed upon reporting standards. But giving consumers the possibility of putting financial pressure on vendors based on emissions is critical.

Not enough, too little too late - yet still critical.

What standard? How about "kilograms"?

What's also sad is that China and India regularly pollute the atmosphere (and cover it up) with impunity and are left out of all discussions of climate change because somehow 'developing' means you aren't responsible for your actions.

India is one of the very few countries set to achieve a significant chunk of its Paris commitments. In fact, India is already a global leader in renewables, and it does so in objective conditions far worse than other countries have.

[EDIT: see how India is ranked https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/ IMHO Modi will go down in history as the greatest Indian leader after Gandhi]

Inspiring

There is no point in talking about India and China if there is literally no country on Earth that is on track for the 1.5° goal. It just distracts from the problems in your own country to point fingers at China and India.

You can't point fingers at the US when the pollution is so bad in your cities that you need to wear gas masks or risk lung cancer in a few years.

It seems nobody really wants to solve the problem and instead wants to just blame the US/Europe, while ignoring the biggest polluters on the planet.

You can't tell me this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China

Is not causing enormous amounts of damage to our environment and planet.

Why? It's no excuse not to do something.

It's like me telling my children they must not smoke, whilst lighting one up.

I'm in the UK. Globally our emissions count for almost nothing. Yet I want people to blame the UK for every misstep and failure on climate. I badly want the UK, and everywhere on the planet net zero, asap. The more pressure to do that, from all sources, the better.

Maybe when someone hits net zero we'll start to see carbon tariffs on all imports... Probably wishful thinking, but I can hope.

Though I agree with you that India and China should do more but they still are way behind in carbon use per person. And are investing heavily on renewables so hopefully will never use as much per person as US or Europe are now.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/chart-of-the-day-thes...

But this is the reason I don't believe we will be able to stop or even slow down climate change much as major power consumption growth is going to be outside US and Europe. So even if they are able to bring down carbon use the growth of carbon use in other places like Africa and Asia will offset it. The world is fucked and I am very pessimistic about it. The world population is expected to go over 10billion in the future but the world can't sustain the 8billion we have now.

Of course the CO2 China and India emit is damaging. But until my country fixes their own problems I don't see why I should tell other people to fix theirs. I probably emit several times as much CO2 as the average Indian.

What we really need to invest in is Nuclear energy. It's clean and efficient. But the liberals in the US will always be against it. Who knows, we might not even have an issue if so many communities around the US had been against it in the 80s and 90s.

The other sad fact is that after all we do to prevent CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere, it won't stop humans from emitting it. I predict the next thing will be population control.

Well, if only that energy some people spend shaming their peers into limiting their lifestyle and forgoing the idea of raising kids was actually spent on legislative framework dealing with the actual biggest polluters, we would be living in a much more enjoyable world.

On the one hand, I can see why they make this claim -- their energy efficiency is a competitive advantage, and could tip off the competitors as to how large their infrastructure in Australia is.

On the other hand, they're a public company that has to release their financial information publicly, and that too is a competitive advantage. If everyone has to share the same info, is it really an advantage anymore?

I think they're just trying to avoid getting to a point where energy use is required to be shared in the same way as financial information.

I'm confused, why should type of energy usage be made public, forceably?

Ok if we want to go down this route but I'm not really reading any reasons for forcing this.

I disagree with the idea entirely. My energy usage is between myself (my company) and the utility company. Why anyone else has to have this information shouldn't even be an ongoing issue. I'm glad my business don't have to deal with that nonsense.

If they used slave labor to increase profits, that would also be a competitive advantage, yet it should be disclosed since its materially disgusting. I don't see that if they were pumping out massive tons of CO2 or not, that should not also be disclosed.

So are they "privately" reporting data to the regulator and the regulator wants to publush it for public review effectively? I'm guessing all the data gets published or this wouldn't be an issue...

Is GCP carbon neutral? If amazon is hiding emissions data, I wonder if we should look at other providers.

Which are the greenest clouds in general?

I think the slow pace on carbon footprint will end up biting Amazon in the ass. The public sector of Europe is busy moving our infrastructure into the “public cloud” and carbon emissions are going to be one of the key deciding measurements for the political layer. Politicians mainly care about cost, some about scandal avoidance (safety) and almost none about the “right” technical solution. It’s always been like that, and that’s fine, but recently climate and carbon footprint has been beating cost.

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