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> If they have to worry about what latest moral crusade will try to get you kicked off the cloud platform, they will be a lot more reticent about migrating to cloud.

Equating climate change activism with all other forms of social justice is a common trend I see. They seem so different to me–the difference between empirical reality and ideology. While the outcomes of climate change will be ideological–save climate refugees or preserve competitive advantage and wealth–the immediate concern of attempting to mitigate the impacts of climate change are relatively rational.

> if you were a fossil fuel or car company that makes gas burning vehicles

Have you tried putting on your role-playing hats and empathising with some of the points being made on the environmentalist side?

The problem with most climate change activism is that it’s hyper-targeted against the offender du jour and all of the others are largely ignored. It’s a global-scale problem that demands global-scale solutions; the vigilantism isn’t doing anything other than providing a straw man for the opposition to knock down.

The problem with most activism of any kind is it is done in a response to the actual authorities on the subject doing nothing to help. Activism almost by definition is done by people who can't directly make a change and just want to bring attention to a problem. That means focusing attention on one thing.

If the people who could solve the problem were trying to solve the product, activists wouldn't be necessary. As long as activists are involved, there's going to have to be a narrow focus excluding most of the problem.

Then by all means you should show Sierra, 350, Sunrise, ER, and all of the other folks out there how to do it better.

I mean this sincerely: I’ve been deeply involved in political and civic activism for the past couple years, and have learned a ton, especially from other people—but I also find it deeply frustrating when seemingly well intentioned folks offer unspecific feedback on how the significant investments of time, money, and energy I and others around me could be spent activisting better.

The goal is policy change, and that requires convincing people to vote for things. The path that makes that happen is education, policy advocacy, and ultimately gaining political office.

Direct action, however, tends to put more emphasis on the activists themselves as the problem instead of whatever their platform is. This is only useful when it demonstrates a sufficient commitment by a large number of people, which can demonstrate wide popular support— rallies, peaceful protests, etc. that involve enough people to potentially change the outcome of an election.

My problem is really with the publicity stunts done by a small number of people. From outside, it looks like an egotistical act and, if not dismissed entirely, hurts the reputation of everyone doing useful work in the same field. Antagonizing people is a poor way to convince them of anything.

As for why I don’t go into politics myself, it isn’t my calling and I don’t have the temperament to be successful at it. I believe I’ll do more concrete good in the world by being kind and helpful to those I meet in this journey we call life than by trying to force my concerns to the forefront of attention.

It seems more and more of a trend for movements to cling onto each other for validation. Unfortunately it seems to deeply undermine individual struggles and ultimately water down the (very important) messages.

select * from users where supports_climate_change = true

becomes

select * from users where supports_climate_change = true AND supports_cause_b = true AND supports_cause_c = true

Ultimately you get way fewer users...

Nah, fossil fuel companies will just create subsidiaries that will be in charge of all their IT infrastructure... or just contract it out.

Are Amazon employees going to demand that Amazon not do business with companies that do business with fossil fuel companies? How many layers down are they going to demand?

(Disclaimer: I used to work at AWS.)

> won't try to be a "hero" and use their insider access to try to sabotage your operations or leak confidential data?

We do have examples of that. Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

SPC Manning, in particular, was particularly vulnerable to exploitation due to her dysphoria and her chain of command's inability to recognize this problem and mitigate it. And Wikileaks recruited and turned that asset.

Snowden was certainly regarded as a HUMINT asset by someone, but he's more the self-motivated ideological case that you're talking about.

In both cases, the penalties are much more severe than a private company can bring against an employee, so it's realistic. At the same time, I'm honestly surprised that there weren't more. There are a shitload of government contractors since the usual requirement is a clearance and a pulse.

> I mean if a person thinks they are literally saving the planet from destruction, sabotaging an oil company's cloud infrastructure seems like something that they would at least seriously consider doing.

It's the classic insider threat scenario. And so Amazon does have strategies to limit what rogue employees can do, as selling corporate clients on cloud services would be a nonstarter without it. I didn't have broad enough knowledge to speak to how effectively they're able to mitigate the threat.

> I think Amazon and the other cloud companies need to come down hard and state unequivocally that cloud services are not fodder for political crusades, and they will allow all companies that are conducting legal business activities, to be able to use their cloud.

I don't think you can crack down on people like that. They'll just go dark.

And my read of the senior guys is they're genuinely sympathetic to these causes. Maybe one response is, "you say you want urgent action, but you're engineers. You know that it's the slow grind that delivers solutions, not the sturm and drang."

It's interesting to speculate what would happen if an employee did leak customer data... many companies have gone through crises you'd think would wreck their reputation forever and the market turned out to be shockingly forgiving.

Or maybe we'd find out that private clouds are actually quite economical, you just get some standardized racks and run various management services. Hell, you can even resell excess capacity just like how Amazon got started.

If they got caught seems like a CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) charge would be brought.

"There's no cloud: it's just someone else's computer (and it's run by people who hate your guts)"

Thankfully for the world, only in the US does climate science seem to have been quite so politicised. I've never quite understood how that was achieved so successfully, as whenever a significant UK denier has cropped up in our media, they just sound like an ignorant idiot. It leaves little doubt they've not even tried to understand the scientific advice, and most will dismiss them accordingly.

The right in the UK and the rest of Europe may not be doing enough to mitigate the problem, but very, very few of them are denying there is a problem. Or trying to associate those agitating for more action with political or moral crusades. A majority of voters, of all political hues, seem to agree with the need for more dramatic action.

To the greater point, all companies will have to adjust to a low or zero carbon world. If they don't they can expect greater action from activists, regulators and governments, and changes to what constitutes legal activity. Even the London stock market recently adjusted the categories companies were in - to make it easier to identify those firms people might increasingly want to divest from for being fossil related.

Continental US hasn't warmed as much as the rest of the world. In Europe we have seen and experienced extreme heatwaves and droughts in the last decade. https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/record-summer-heat-bakes... The US on the other hand hasn't had temperatures increase that much and has even had many unusually cold winters.

>I think Amazon and the other cloud companies need to come down hard and state unequivocally that cloud services are not fodder for political crusades, and they will allow all companies that are conducting legal business activities, to be able to use their cloud.

HN, please don't turn the following in to a flame war. That said...

How does this fit in with companies that de-platform organizations that they see as promoting extremism? There have been some high-profile cases where services like Patreon, CloudFlare and YouTube have banned people who weren't breaking the law, but were doing something management found politically unacceptable. This is interesting because YouTube is run by Google, who also offers cloud services.

I’m not a lawyer, but a lot of these crusades smell like tortious interference[1]. A lot of people just don’t know their rights, but if a third party, which I imagine includes an employee acting in a personal capacity, interferes and causes your AWS contract to be dropped you have a solid cause of action against them. And unlike a lot of activists, Amazon employees may well be worth suing.

And this is a good thing, because reliable contracting is foundational to a developed economy. If you can’t rely on your contracts being honored over arbitrary non stipulated issues then your operation becomes massively less efficient.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference

Why can't employees voice their concerns to their companies? I imagine such a large company like Amazon, it would be near impossible to get a direct response without something bigger like this. Companies are groups of people working towards a goal/service/whatever and those people all have ideas on how to make the world a better place. If the company wants to shut them down, sure, but companies have ideologies too and don't always have to play the "neutral" card. Which, IMO, climate change shouldn't even be a political issue.

Selling an idea, even one we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt is always going to be a political issue. There's no getting around the fact that nobody is born with an innate sense of statistics.

It seems like that reasoning would put everything into the bucket of "political issue". I feel like it is more intertwined with forcing people to change (gas cars to EV) OR removing a flow of money (oil industry).

That’s because everything is political—including choosing to be apolitical.

> Selling an idea, even one we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt is always going to be a political issue.

So is allowing corporations in the first place, that is also not a result of some innate sense of perfect knowledge of everything surrounding the issue.

Too many companies, too many people in them want the cake and eat it, they want societies to uphold their responsibilities towards them, but not the other way around.

I think your unfounded suspicions amount to FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. You have no evidence that people concerned about climate change would be more underhanded or less loyal to their employer than other employees. A company has no reason to fear working with another company because its employees exercise the right to free speech.(+) Claiming such a fear is rational... Well, I think you can see how that would cause people to shut up because they are afraid of being seen as a liability and fired. That would be bad, wouldn't it?

A similar situation existed in many Western countries during the Cold war. Communists were afraid to speak their mind because they would be labelled Russian spies and they would be blacklisted. There were of course lots of people that spied for the Soviet union though. But crucially, only one (that I know of) were a devout Communist. All the others were spying for monetary reasons.

+ - Last I heard an American senator recently proposed that the US should stop selling crowd-control equipment to China. If a politician can propose that, why can't an employee propose that Amazon should not host oil exploration companies?

You see to be confusing "political crusade" with "effort to respond to the scientific data showing that current carbon usage is unsustainable and a significant threat to civilisation".

I think that's precisely the point.

You've conflated a few different ideas there under the banner of 'moral crusades'. Law enforcement and climate change issues have very little in common. Your initial quote calls out "oil and gas extraction" - we're not talking about like, making more efficient cars, we're talking about literally pulling more carbon out of the ground so that someone can chuck it into the air.

The distinction is between "something that someone probably should care about" and "something that everyone must care about".

Climate change mitigation should itself be a 'defense initiative', given the impacts that sea level rise and increased weather variability will have on national defense over the next decades, as well as the increased level of conflict in hotspots around the globe [1].

[1]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/3/150302-syria-...

It's deeply depressing to see climate-related activities portrayed as political crusades, moreover on this forum!

CC is not some subjective moral agenda we could disagree on. It's a scientifically proven disaster that had already happened, and have been known and ongoing for almost half a century now.

> It's a scientifically proven disaster that has already happened

Ok, then where are the thousands of people dying? Where's the "disaster" part? Proclaiming something to be a disaster when the average person can't even tell something is wrong without being told something is wrong is the problem. "It's a disaster because our computers and scientific instruments have predicted it to be so!" doesn't carry much weight. People need tangible evidence that impacts their bottom line.

If you are in the Bahamas right now and you told someone "Hurricane Dorian is a scientifically proven disaster that has already happened," they would believe you, because they can see the carnage with their own eyes. They can see that their house is missing. They can see trees torn out of the ground.

Say the same thing about climate change and they'll think "huh, this summer didn't seem any hotter than when I was a kid. And last winter we still got tons of snow like we always do." and they'll write it off as hyperbole.

>where are the thousands of people dying?

Currently, mostly in India, Africa and Middle-East.

>People need tangible evidence

And we'll have plenty of that, if even the most conservative/optimist projections will materialize. Patience.

> And we'll have plenty of that, if even the most conservative/optimist projections will materialize. Patience.

Right, and when we do, that will be the fire under humanity's collective butt to mobilize and act. It might be too late, it might not. I have faith that we will pull through.

Not to take sides here, but every earnestly held political belief is seen by its passionate supporters as a known, proven fact.

I think the people need to come down hard on these companies. Nothing else works. Collective action gets the goods. Business disruption is necessary to get the rulers to change their ways.

if you think that people fighting to preserve organized society on earth from the reality of climate apocalypse is "the latest moral crusade" or a "political crusade"...

you're wrong.