Amazon has been marking their own homework and giving themselves 10/10 in their latest sustainability report. The reality is vastly different:
- Annual carbon emissions have grown by 40% since 2019.
- They claim to have reached 100% renewable energy usage in their data centres – in reality, they get an estimated 22% renewable energy from local utilities in the regions Amazon operate data centres, the rest are via RECs (renewable energy certificates) and questionable accounting practices.
- Amazon previously committed to making half of shipments net-zero by 2030 – they are so off track they deleted the original blog post announcing it
- AWS projected to be making $9.6 billion annually from the oil and gas industry alone next year
A group of Amazon employees calling themselves the Amazon Employees for Climate justice previously shamed Amazon into making their climate commitments back in 2019, and they are the ones continuing to push and highlight these issues. Their report goes into extensive detail on the challenges with RECs. And while there are cases of RECs enabling truly additional renewable energy infrastructure,
- 68% of Amazons RECs do not fund any new renewable energy infrastructure (by Amazon’s own disclosure)
- Over half of AWS regions likely do not have *any* renewable projects on the same grid
- Power consumption is matched to generation on an annual basis – – which means they will still be driving demand for non-renewable generation at times of day that demand does not match generation.
Amazon’s claims to be nearing 100% renewable energy generation seems a stretch to say the least.
If you’re an AWS customer, I encourage you to contact your account managers and flag your concerns regarding these holes in Amazon’s claims.
And meanwhile, a reminder that if you’re relying on their carbon reporting tools for AWS, assume your figures are under-reporting by at least 8x, due to the lack of Scope 3 reporting, and reliance on market-based reporting for Scope 2.