Paul stopped by CRN today to talk about Amazon's new goal of getting to net zero carbon on 50% of their shipments by 2030.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I am Ross Kenyon, Lead Strategist with Nori, the Carbon Removal Marketplace. I have with me today Paul Gamble, who is CEO at Nori. Paul has been very excited. In fact, he pitched me on this story when he saw that Amazon has a new thing they’re doing called Shipment Zero. So what is that, Paul? What’s been happening with Amazon?
Paul Gambill: Please, Mr. Editor, let me tell my story. So I got really excited a couple days ago when Amazon released on February 18th a statement on their day one blog, which is where they deal with sort of community outreach foundational sustainability stuff. And the headline of this is called Delivering Shipment Zero, a Vision for Net Zero Carbon Shipments. It’s Amazon’s vision to make all Amazon shipments net zero carbon with 50% of all shipments net zero by 2030. And this is really exciting. This is something totally brand new from Amazon because, you know, we’ve been trying to research what different companies in the space are doing around their carbon emissions.
And up until now, Amazon really hasn’t said much in the past about carbon. They have laid out a long-term goal to power all of their global infrastructure using 100% renewable energy in the past, but they don’t really have firm dates for that. And if you’re a listener to either reversing climate change or carbon removal newsroom, You understand well that just switching over to renewable energy isn’t enough. We have to actually draw down carbon out of the atmosphere. So this is exciting because Amazon is an enormous company that has a huge carbon footprint.
And it’s also interesting because, I mean, I’m an Amazon Prime member and I buy things off of Amazon frequently. And there are a lot of emissions wrapped up into all of those deliveries that we all benefit from. So Amazon can be a force for good in making consumer goods available to people widely anywhere in the world at a low cost, but there is an environmental cost to that. And this is great because Amazon is finally starting to recognize that they have to deal with that cost.
Ross Kenyon: Is this in response at least partially to some of the criticism they’ve had over their carbon policies, both internally from employees and shareholders, but also externally? Yeah.
Paul Gambill: The timing of it makes me think that is quite likely. So you’re referring to back in November, a group of more than a dozen Amazon employees filed a shareholder resolution that was trying to urge Amazon to... And shareholder resolutions are a really interesting way to get companies to do that because they’re put forward. I believe they go to a vote of the shareholders at the next shareholders meeting, which is in a month or two from now, I think, with Amazon. So I think this is them probably trying to get ahead of that action by those employees.
Ross Kenyon: How much control would activist investors like that actually be able to change policy at Amazon? Do you have any idea? It seems like at least the public pressure that they’re putting on Amazon is working. It seems like quite successful activism.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, I mean, that story was picked up by the New York Times and a bunch of other media outlets. So it was talked about quite a bit in the public sphere. When it comes to the ways that activist shareholders work, I mean, that’s a whole other podcast. And there probably are other podcasts just about that.
Ross Kenyon: We should we should do one of those maybe on reversing climate change sometime.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, that’d be kind of interesting. But there are lots of ways for small minority shareholder groups to leverage their power and get large corporations to move in ways that they want. So this is definitely a useful tool for those people.
Ross Kenyon: Do you have any any sense on how they’re actually going to achieve this shipment zero goal?
Paul Gambill: No. And they don’t actually say it either. Actually, all that they said was that, quote, to track our progress on this journey and as part of an overall commitment to sharing our sustainability goals, we plan to share Amazon’s company-wide carbon footprint along with related goals and programs later this year. This follows an extensive project over the past two years to develop an advanced scientific model to carefully map our carbon footprint to provide our business teams with detailed information, helping them identify ways to reduce carbon use in their business. They haven’t shared any public information, but there is a group, part of 350.
org, 350 Seattle, who have done their own estimations on what the total carbon emissions are from Amazon shipping operations in 2017. And based on their research, they estimated that Amazon was responsible for at least 19. 1 million metric tonnes of CO2 in 2017 alone, which sort of, they have a nice little infographic, and we’ll share this in the show notes, that equates to 4. 7 coal-fired power plants operating for one year, or 2. 9 million homes annual electricity usage.
Ross Kenyon: That’s just for the United States Amazon operations or is that worldwide?
Paul Gambill: That’s a good question. My guess is that is probably in the US.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I would expect that probably to be so.
Paul Gambill: They probably don’t have good data outside the US.
Ross Kenyon: That’s I’m trying to think if I expected it to be larger or smaller than that amount, given how many trucks.
Paul Gambill: You know what? I’m rereading it. It actually says worldwide.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, it’s worldwide. Oh, OK. Yeah, that actually maybe even strikes me as somewhat somewhat small for a company. But I don’t know that I have the best basis of comparison across enterprise to be able to say if this is a lot or not.
Paul Gambill: That’s a lot. It’s a lot. Yeah. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: And I guess if I’m thinking about all of the fleets of trucks that are constantly delivering Amazon Prime to people’s door. Yeah.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. And so for their methodology, 350s methodology to figure this out, they say we arrived at 19. 1 million metric The number of 2017 Amazon deliveries is an estimate from the company’s released data point of Prime members ordering 5 billion items worldwide in 2017 with the addition of another 30% for non-Prime membership customers.
Ross Kenyon: Those are some big numbers. Okay. Wow. So this is a big move, though. So we’ll be watching to see how exactly they plan to do this. Do you want to look into your crystal ball, as Christoph likes to say, reversing climate change? What might happen here?
Paul Gambill: The reason I’m so excited about this, the reason I pitched this story to you, my editor, is that Amazon is a really interesting use case. I mean, we at Nori, we’re based in Seattle. Amazon’s based in Seattle. So when Amazon talks about getting their Zero carbon or half of them by 2030. They can’t just like turn off the emissions. When companies try to deal with their carbon emissions, they have a couple different ways of doing that. They might try to switch more of their energy consumption over to renewable energy. They might try to reduce overall emissions by making some sort of change to their operations or supply chain or manufacturing process, whatever.
But then the last thing that they can do when they’re left with the final carbon emissions that they just can’t get rid of is to offset them or remove them. And what I would love to see is a way... There’s a way for Amazon to just easily tie into an API for reversing climate change so that automatically whenever an order is placed on Amazon.com, that same order also takes care of the software in the background for paying for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And I think that there’s a lot of amazing potential there.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, one of the things at Nori that I think makes us quite unique is the hardcore software focus, which is not always represented in environmental spaces. In fact, some of the original people we worked with got attracted to working with us because they’re like, oh God, there’s a software application that can be built for climate change and this is not a common thing.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, it’s kind of a unique thing, but it’s really needed if we’re going to come up with scalable ways that distribute around the world.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. Well, is there anything else your editor should graciously allow you to say?
Unknown speaker: Thank you. No problem.
Ross Kenyon: We won’t always talk about Nori so much, but it did seem relevant. Thank you for listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom. If you like what we’re doing here, please tell your friends. Please help us make carbon removal a bigger part of the conversation around climate change. Rate and review this podcast in iTunes if you like it. If you don’t, forget that I just said that. And thank you so much for listening.
