Amazon Backs Out of Climate Pledge, Deletes Shipment Zero Initiative Blogpost
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
We end up parking nearby since it's cheaper/easier to do so. Completely the worst set of incentives.
For instance, Paris is currently building 200km of new metros, with minimal disruption outside of stations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express
There's also the massive Chinese subway building program. And the London Crossrail. And many others.
America has a long way to go, but people who work in this space know that every country has its problems.
There's a passenger rail magazine available at larger American bookstores and sometimes model railroad shops. It covers passenger rail news around the world, and really lays out some of the massive problems that exist in every country.
You cite Crossrail as an example, but Crossrail was notoriously plagued with problems and controversy. It was first labeled a "high priority" 1974. It opened 48 years later.
Britain's train system is so dysfunctional, it's being re-nationalized. Train companies are bailing on their contracts because they can't make money. And the entire country is littered with hundreds of abandoned train station and rail lines that were discontinued, cutting off many towns and villages.
It's also comical that you state that "bulldozing the poor away to build infrastructure" is an American thing, and then turn to China as a shining example. You can't be serious. China has displaced millions of people (bulldozed) because they were in the way of transit projects. If America could employ construction workers for China's meager wages, America would have trains everywhere. Perhaps if it brought back slave labor, like China has, that would work.
> America has a long way to go, but people who work in this space know that every country has its problems.
Of course nobody is saying transit is perfect anywhere. Hong Kong is expensive, Japan has overcrowding issues (not enough capacity), older systems like Paris and London have relatively frequently breakdowns due to the age / lack newer features like platform screen doors (and retrofitting them is super expensive and long, cf. Paris lines 1 and 4). However, problems on transit in the US are... decades behind, and much worse than pretty much anywhere in the developed world. It was comical arriving at SFO and going to the BART station and seeing a plaque commemorating the mayor/governor/commissioner/whatever for his magical foresight in pushing to have BART go to the airport... something considered common fucking sensepretty much anywhere is being commemorated by plaques in the US, that's how bad things are there.
Yes, Crossrail was massively over budget and late - and of course it was, it was being built in one of the biggest cities in the world which has history and settlements spanning back thousands of years, and had to go around and interface with infrastructure going back more than a hundred years. Very few American cities have anything even close to that amount of complexity.
> Britain's train system is so dysfunctional, it's being re-nationalized. Train companies are bailing on their contracts because they can't make money. And the entire country is littered with hundreds of abandoned train station and rail lines that were discontinued, cutting off many towns and villages.
Yes, the British rail system is badly mismanaged. It's still much better than anywhere in the US though, in terms of availability, punctuality and price. Yes, it simply isn't profitable to serve every little town, so many had to be abandoned which is sad. Nationalising the system is a good step forward that will probably improve service overall.
> It's also comical that you state that "bulldozing the poor away to build infrastructure" is an American thing, and then turn to China as a shining example. You can't be serious. China has displaced millions of people (bulldozed) because they were in the way of transit projects. If America could employ construction workers for China's meager wages, America would have trains everywhere. Perhaps if it brought back slave labor, like China has, that would work.
Yes, it is mostly an American thing, where most cities underwent bulldozing of the poor/non-white neighbourhoods to build highways. When China does it it's more generic "you're in the way" and not an explicitly racist/anti-poor thing. Furthermore, I specifically talked about China's metros, which are in their vast majority underground, so there was nobody to bulldoze over.
Nobody ever thinks "hmm, now we have a perfectly good boring machine sitting at the end of a tunnel in the middle of the metropolitan area. Hey, I have an idea! Let's continue boring and extend the tunnel!"
My favorite was when they bored a new tunnel downtown, and stuffed the resulting rubble into the Battery tunnel, thus providing 0 extra capacity for $$$$$$.
They ripped up the rail tracks from Renton to Black Diamond. After all, what could you do with rail lines connecting one city to a bedroom community?
Lastly, there used to be a rail line connecting Renton to Bothell. What to do with that, what to do with that ... Oh, I know! Let's rip up the tracks, tear down its bridges, and make it thoroughly unusable. Not do anything sensible like connect it to the west side light rail so there's service all the way around Lake Washington. Several people carefully explained to me that it was impossible to use right-of-way for trains for light rail, impossible to poor a concrete platform at stops, etc. But it is possible to spend tens of billions of dollars mowing down neighborhoods on the west side.
Government civil engineering in King County is a mystery to me.
Don't try to put it in the voters' lap.
Sounds like you couldn't figure it out, that's not the fault of the infrastructure, but rather bad UX for route planning. FWIW, Paris Metro (which is great) also had wonky UX, until you get the hang of it.
Anyway, take the Link Light Rail to Westlake Station. That's where you catch the Monorail to CPA. Do it in reverse at the end of your event.
The Monorail takes Orca now, and the transfer at Westlake is not bad at all. I would highly recommend giving it a try.
Light rail -> monorail -> Climate Pledge works extremely well. Not sure why GP is complaining, or anyone. The monorail was completely useless forever, no doubt about it, but now it's actually good for the Kraken and shows at Climate Pledge.
Shovels in the ground 2026, ETA 2037.
[1] https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion/west-seattle-b...
[2] https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion/west-seattle-b...
I'm a huge supporter of rapid transit in our area and it just breaks my heart to see our (best-case) pace of construction, especially when I go and look at European and Asian rapid transit projects.
It's not a strictly apples-to-apples comparison, but the Circle Line on the Singapore MRT was approved in 1998, broke ground in 2002, partially opened in 2011, and is scheduled for completion in 2026.
Unless you have the freedom to make up the rules as you go along, as sometimes happens with e.g. China's metro and rail expansion, this stuff always takes time.
It boggles the mind.
Another reason for slow progress in Seattle, as I understand, is funding delays - segments can't begin until certain funds have matured at certain specified years.
There are obviously considerations to optimise for but how do you need 5 years for planning, _then another 5 years for design_?
Boston began planning a 4 mile line extension in 2006, completed 2022[0]
And given that we're talking about a concert at some sort of large facility, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes you more than 20 minutes to get out of the parking garage after the event, let alone drive yourself home in the post-concert traffic.
This is also without even addressing how sad it is to me that someone might consider 20 minutes to be "quite a walk". If you're mobility-impaired or there's some severe weather going on, sure, but otherwise... oof.
Then other person said it would be 20m to walk from the train station. Not 20m from OP’s house.
Assuming the car is generally faster than the train, you now have a choice between train + another 20m walk, or car + whatever time it takes to park.
20m is enough to get the bike out for, but that’s not an option after taking the train.
The monorail is cool, but if you have transit links in Seattle and the monorail is OOS, you can always walk that stretch pretty easily.
Right, with this attitude, nothing will ever improve. Yes, infrastructure needs to be built, no question. But if "cheaper/easier to do" are the only criteria for people to decide how to act, we are doomed. Get your act together and make some sacrifice, or stop talking about climate change altogether.
Deleted blogpost: https://web.archive.org/web/20230525232713/https://www.about....
See also: Amazon fights to kill emissions bill in Oregon, despite climate pledge [1].
Corporate statements\speech needs to be regulated. There needs to be a law that holds them explicitly to any and all statements.
> "The federal securities laws prohibit deceptive conduct and material misrepresentations in the purchase or sale of securities," said Kathryn A. Pyszka, an Associate Director in the SEC’s Chicago Regional Office. "We will take action when, as alleged, parties fraudulently induce investors to sell their securities through lies and deception."
From random press release: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-17
I'm not an expert on it, so I'm wondering: as it stands, can an SEC court indicate that Amazon made a material change to their company value by walking their promise to be greener back?
Public individuals are routinely held accountable for their statements.
Why shouldn't customers be allowed to hold corporations to the same standards?
If corporations promise a feature, then fail to deliver, they should be held liable for false advertisement.
Similarly, if Microsoft promises Windows 10 is the last "Windows Version", then launches Windows 11, we should be allowed to sue them for making false statements.
Oh wait
I just want a law that makes false advertisement absolutely, unequivocally, illegal. Corporations should sell what they have now, not what they might have in the future.
> Why shouldn't customers be allowed to hold corporations to the same standards?
Nothing is stopping customers from holding corporations accountable, by taking their business elsewhere if they find a corporation to be unreliable.
"Public individual" is not exclusive to members of the american government. Should we legislate that as well? Nations have started legislating laws against falsehoods after all.
Minor public figures, the latest most "current" example being video creators on social media platforms, are routinely held accountable for failure to disclose sponsorships. Why aren't corporations found in legal trouble for failing to disclose that XYZ feature was never going to happen?
I should add, private individuals are also held accountable for statements in court. Why should such things be exclusive to courts? Does the truth only matter in front of a judge? Should we not find the act of lying for the sake of greater sales, a despicable act?
> Nothing is stopping customers from holding corporations accountable, by taking their business elsewhere if they find a corporation to be unreliable.
This is a blatant lie. Customers boycotting Chevron doesn't stop them from buying judges and violating the environments of various nations such as Ecuador. Individual consumers, even consumers coming together to form a large group, still cannot effect any major damage to a corporation. The only entities that can truly "fight" a corporation are similarly sized governments or organized violent attacks on corporate property.
Which nations? How? Who determines what is a "falsehood"? A failed prediction is not the same thing as a lie. It might be disappointing if a company predicts they will be able to deliver a feature and it turns out that they can't, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were lying when they said they were going to.
Yes it would be nice if the world were perfectly controllable and predictable and everything that went wrong was a result of bad people deliberately deceiving you, but that's not reality.
All such laws would accomplish is to ensure that nobody ever makes a definitive statement about anything, ever again. Couch everything in weasel words to ensure that there is sufficiently vagueness to combat an accusations of "lying" and you're good to go.
> Customers boycotting Chevron doesn't stop them from buying judges and violating the environments of various nations such as Ecuador.
Because customers en masse largely don't know or care about the environment in Ecuador and no significant percentage of them are going to engage in any such boycott. The end-users filling up their cars at gas station are also not "customers" in any meaningful sense for Chevron, who is selling petroleum products wholesale in an entirely different market.
Meanwhile, customers finding that Sears is no longer a good place to buy the things they need and shopping for appliances at Home Depot and Lowe's absolutely did have an effect on Sears and let them know that they were failing to meet the needs of their customers.
Fakenews laws specifically. They are popping up everywhere from Europe, Asia, some American states, etc. For better or worse.
> A failed prediction is not the same thing as a lie.
It is absolutely a lie/falsehood if you use it during a sales pitch. "We promise to create XYZ feature in the near future. That's why our product is a great deal!" should be immediately binding, with legal ramifications looming. You are selling the concept of future features as a reason to purchase or invest. Failure is no longer an option.
Don't like that? Then don't make bullshit statements! It's very very easy to not make false statements!
> It might be disappointing if a company predicts they will be able to deliver a feature and it turns out that they can't, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were lying when they said they were going to.
If you make a promise you cannot keep, you lied. Simple as that. Corporations should never receive the benefit of the doubt.
> Because customers en masse largely don't know or care about the environment in Ecuador and no significant percentage of them are going to engage in any such boycott. The end-users filling up their cars at gas station are also not "customers" in any meaningful sense for Chevron, who is selling petroleum products wholesale in an entirely different market.
Which is why the laws are needed.
> Meanwhile, customers finding that Sears is no longer a good place to buy the things they need and shopping for appliances at Home Depot and Lowe's absolutely did have an effect on Sears and let them know that they were failing to meet the needs of their customers.
Which resulted in Sears attempting to catch up VIA IP theft. They have lost multiple legal suites over this, with entire expose' written about it. Overall, this example is irrelevant, as Sears is a local company beholden to local consumers. Completely unlike major corporations like Chevron or Microsoft.
> Nations have started legislating laws against falsehoods after all.
Unfortunately, this is just a tool in quite a large government's drawer for suppressing any kind of dissent. "My" government and their political party are the biggest spreaders of misinformation and blatant lies, but don't even for a second think this will be used against them or any lying corporation. This is squarely aimed at the political opposition, and even more so at anyone daring to upset the status quo.
One might think that tool morality is a result on how it’s used, bit I would rather not have it because it’s ripe for abuse.
Nothing except layers of political lobbying, misleading advertising, opaque corporate ownership, and monopolistic practices. The result being:
- You won't find out about corporate misdeeds, and if you do
- You will be told it's not that bad or that they've changed, and if you don't believe that
- You will have trouble finding a brand that they do not own, and if you find that
- It won't be as easy to obtain or cheap
> If corporations promise a feature, then fail to deliver, they should be held liable for false advertisement.
You will definitely find out if the promised feature was delivered or not. You will be aware of the identity of the company that promised the feature. You may absolutely evaluate whether you continue to purchase things from that company, based on their past performance.
This is well within the ability of consumers and they do it all the time, regardless of any laws about "false advertising" to which this may or may not apply.
As for whether consumers should be making their purchase decisions on completely unrelated data about "corporate misdeeds", such as how the company may or may not have behaved in a foreign country, a situation the consumer does indeed know little to nothing about. No, I don't think that basing purchasing decision on things like that is effective or useful, but people are of course welcome to use whatever factors they like.
Then they simply wouldn't set any such goals. Why would they bother risking it?
If you want targets that are accountable, advocate for actual laws that set emissions limits, and a government that is willing to enforce them. Nobody is going to eat a fine on a completely voluntary PR statement. It's easier to just not make the statement in the first place.
Good. At least then they're not profiting off of the climate crisis while taking no action.
It would still be different from a statement like "Windows 10 is the final version of Windows".
What damages would you claim?
If not possible, then Microsoft should refund every single Windows 10 purchase, as well as all license fees stemming from that same claim.
The answer would simply be "It's not Windows10."
They promised Windows 10 as the last edition. It doesn't matter whether Windows11 is an upgrade or not. Microsoft explicitly made a marketing statement declaring that all future updates to "Windows" would be updates for Windows10, not new editions.
Further more, the Microsoft Corporation explicitly stated that "There will be no Windows 11".
Further quotes : "Right now we're releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we're all still working on Windows 10," Jerry Nixon
Any other claims by Microsoft are automatically denied, pay up or get fucked.
I wish that was how it worked.
Again, they gave you a free upgrade. What exactly are your damages (and no, "Microsoft lied" is not damage)?
> Speaking at Microsoft’s Ignite conference in Chicago, developer evangelist Jerry Nixon said: “Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10.”
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/11/windows-1...
---
> Again, they gave you a free upgrade. What exactly are your damages (and no, "Microsoft lied" is not damage)?
Doesn't matter. They pulled a bait and switch. They refund all Windows10 license purchases which were predicated on the expectation of Windows 10 being the last version.
The time period would be from the first time they officially made that claim, all the way till the official announcement of Windows11.
They shouldn't get to claim "This is the last version we will ever release, there will never be anything better", then turn around and shit on the statement.
In civil court, damages are the only thing that matters.
The legal fiction if corporations being legal person-like that shields sackler's and whoever headed the credit rating agencies leading up to 2008 is obscene
And because their fiduciary duty is for profit and not a sustainable world, their accountability should be even higher.
Your link was just to their main site, which is still online now.
(The root problem is that the posted article's link is also broken due to the affiliate/click tracking stuff businessinsider.com adds. Their redirect system assumes its safe to add additional query args but the wayback machine interprets these as part of the old url to find in its archives)
Assuming that we think within system, till incentives like punitive taxation are devised to force the hand of big corporations on that topic, nothing will change. But that won't happen because of lobbies and yaddi-yadda. And even if, I doubt if they wouldn't find ways around it.
So, yeah.
Whenever revenue starts contracting, all the old promises are basically empty words.
On the other hand, I don't see people in tech making buying decisions based on this. Why does your company use AWS or GCP, and did the "nothing more than PR" state of their climate commitments even come up in that decision?
Complaining on the internet is fun, but changing buying habits is better.
I don't see significant enough difference in climate response regarding between Azure and GCP.
Legitimately turned me around on them, thanks for sharing.
MS would probably be bankrupt soon, if they paid for repairing that damage to the environment.
And then consumers think they are all cool and good because their flight was "offset". Carbon offsetting is not real. If your product or consumption is creating greenhouse gasses, the only solution is to stop consuming it until it becomes more efficient itself rather than rely on accounting trickery.
Yea it's a carbon sink, but it'll always be one. There's no way to get ahead
Offsets are like me offsetting the cost of a night out by buying a coffee machine to help my wife to skip Starbucks. The bank balance still goes down.
It's that simple.
They backed out of a climate pledge (50% delivery emissions reduction by 2030), not "The" Climate Pledge (100% cross-sector carbon neutral by 2040 and a few other things).
It doesn't matter that you are not giving the company money anymore, until enough people independently make that decision and then it starts mattering. This is a thing that happens in every economic sphere.
Returned items were transported at least 7000km and up to 29.000km within Europe
But where's that option?
So i'd say fast delivery indeed increases the number of trips, since it enables people to be lazier and just order whenever they need something.
TBH, I don't know why they would do this instead of just... silently missing the target, like I assume most businesses are going to do.
Regulation/incentives and even more technology is going to move the needle, not some greenwashing initiative.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/13/rivian_amazon_electri...
Tesla and Ford seem to have some kind of commercial delivery e-van in the works, though.
The net-zero claims are mostly nonsense in any case -it means continuing to use fossil fuels for jet transport and shipping/trucking while buying 'offsets' in a dubious and unscientific carbon-trading scheme to reach so-called 'net-zero'.
Such offsets don't remove any of the fossil fuel-sourced carbon pumped into the atmosphere on anything like a long-term basis, and are best classified as a fraudulent program pushed by fossil fuel interests in the name of greenwashing their business.
A review: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2020.0011...
Given this, serve your customers at all costs. The environment is something you can deal with later.
In a nutshell, what is the climate propaganda?
I'm not saying there won't be negatives, but to say we are all going to die, is absurd to the extreme. Unfortunately that is common today, however it is merely one in a long line of apocalyptic movements which have been common in every century in recorded history.
But you said:
> The ideology of wanting humans to not send themselves to extinction
It seems pretty clear you are implying we will literally go extinct because of global warming. This is crazy.
Given even a slight, non-zero risk of us doing that, if you have the stance that we shouldn't, it's reasonable to take steps to reduce the risk.
I could have been way more succinct and less sarcastic with my original comment, but it hardly seems worth the effort when replying to a post like theirs.
We're not going extinct any time soon unless someone decides to launch nuclear weapons.
It's implying that we are sending ourselves towards extinction, just as if you were sending yourself towards obesity by continually consuming 10,000 Calories per day. What is really crazy is that there are still climate change deniers that exist in this comments section.
Other claims include that "by 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war.' It's further suggested that this will also come with "widespread crop failure, famine, disease, and mass migration of populations..." And that's just from "my" era. As you go further back, you will find similar reports. Here's [2] one I dug up from 1982: "Monstafa K. Tolba, executive director of the United States environmental program, told delegates that if the nations of the world continued their present policies, they would face by the turn of the century "an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust."
If I could go back 80 years into the past and try to optimize the world for climate action I would make sure that any and all predictions made appealed not to the drama of the high end outliers in order to try to spur on immediate action, but instead did the exact opposite and assumed the low end outliers - so that people would have decades of evidence of my predictions not only coming true, but being far greater in impact. At least in my case, you can thank hyperbolic messaging for the reason I've gone from 'active advocate' to 'meh, I'm somewhat more concerned about nuclear war tbh.'
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...
[2] - https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/1982.j...
Logically, your claim (that catastrophizing drives people away from activism) doesn't make much sense. If you still think that environment has same value as you did in the past, then you should still support the ecological policies, regardless what people are saying. If you only supported them because of catastrophism and not because you don't inherently value it, then you were misled and shouldn't have advocated it in the first place.
What I am saying is you have moral agency, and if you feel misled by other people's factual claims (e.g. exaggerating the impact, regardless of reason), it shouldn't change the validity of your moral stance or your values. But if your values didn't change, you're still an advocate, although perhaps with a different outlook.
I find the whole thing very exhausting. Fine let’s reduce carbon but I’m not going to live my life in panic and depression because of this.
Thinking that mass famine/flooding/heat events in Africa, India, or South America isn’t going to affect you is incredibly naive. Instability ain’t good, and we can’t just welcome it with open arms. Shit that happens in Wuhan, Donetsk and elsewhere do affect you
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-study-rising-...
On social media I've noticed a trend where people attribute every bad thing that immediately comes to mind to climate change. War, extinction, famine, disease and pestilence, I've even seen people confidently throw increases of rape in there when describing the impending hellscape sure to befall humanity in the next x years due to climate change, citing some very dubious chain of correlative logic.
The truth is that a warming planet will change things but not all changes are bad for humans, and those that are bad are not all catastrophic or unmanageable. I think it will do everyone some good to take a step back and look at things with an analytical and curious eye, and reject the urge to panic or spread addictive but harmful fear porn.
That’s quite a buried lede. At best it evens out all the bad effects
I honestly don’t know how to reconcile our worldviews here, and I envy your optimism. But “just wingin it” isn’t what brings about good change. Those with curious and analytical eyes should see that our actions vis a vis climate change and other things have consequences. Good or bad, who really knows. But why are we committing ourselves before knowing?
Seems pretty dumb
It's irrelevant if Ukraine produces 20% extra if other countries can't make enough food. You can't always assume international trade is there or that poor countries, especially, can afford it.
In the past, current deserts (Iraq / Mesopotamia) were much more hospitable to plants and life. Now they are not. Climate change has been a fact of life for all of human history. Now it may be man made, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have lived through this before. The Bible is full of stories regarding drought, famine, floods. That is part of nature.
That said, the globe will be easier to live on if the +x degrees C is minimized from pre-industrial temperatures. Like I'm sure humans will make it but it's up to us the quality of that existence and if we'll share it with current species.
I also get that the globe goes through cycles and the suns heating up in solar cycles, etc. Still pushing more ocean water into the atmosphere, sinking thermal energy into the oceans where we are using up the latent energy of ice melt, (after which there is less cooling capacity available in liquid water than surface ice at constant temperature), acid-ification of oceans that provide food for much of the globe, accelerating arid-ification of already progressing geological areas like US southwest or sub-Saharan Africa, all of these could in part be natural progressions. But if its in our control to reduce the greenhouse gas concentration (that has mechanistic explanation for heat capture, it is not blind correlation) in air or do something crazy like atmospheric geoengineering more people and plants and animals would face a better shot.
Global average temperatures are one part of the story. There is high-frequency temporal variance and spatial variance. Its possible to make a rough order-of-magnitude approximation for energy released in a hurricane. Higher incidence of high wind and heavy rain hurricanes is a measured (~100 years) value. We won't get rid of storms or famine & flood magically. But maybe transitioning from burning stuff for all energy and adopting more scalable living models wrt density and transportation could slow down the bad effects. Its not a conspiracy. Plenty of companies want to capitalize on teh movement but that doesn't invalidate the underlying motivation to change from the current state.
Harnessing fear itself has proven to be a powerful tool of controlling the masses.
Realise the truth and it will set you free.
I really thought they were going to pause and keep them running, for a while longer at least.
I don't pay much attention to stuff outside of the USA. We've got so many problems of our own.
But, in case you're interested, I did find this episode interesting.
"Germany's current energy situation & its past energy choices. A conversation with German energy economist Claudia Kemfert." 2022/11/09
There's plenty of other places where this kind of response is welcome. Also @dang will get cross and we can't have that.
I don't know what this kind of naked abuse with no substance achieves but whatever it is, there are /plenty/ of places to do it. It's been a thing discouraged here in house rules. Making no progress without it seems no worse than making no progress with it to me. I find especially when I just /know/ I'm completely correct about something important and feel emotionally engaged in that, someone is right there to use that to exploit it. So even though I'm right, and obviously so about something deeply, deeply important to the world, remaining calm and rational has value for me and for the proper prosecution of the thing I believe in so strongly. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that.
Ymmv. Anger and rage have their place.