“The mask is off”: Amazon is ditching climate commitments for A.I., activists say
A new letter from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice alleges the company is sidelining its climate goals amid the A.I. boom.
Part of our founding mission at Hard Reset is to explore where the activism in tech that marked the first Trump term has gone. There was once a whole media ecosystem here in the Bay Area dedicated to looking at this: walkouts, petitions, shareholder resolutions, even union and organizing campaigns.
Yet that activism has been quieter as Silicon Valley moved further right and shed some of the idealistic principles that had encouraged workers to speak up. And the media attention has drifted away. The decreased tolerance for dissent within companies, plus three years of layoffs in the industry, has changed the balance of power away from tech workers and towards bosses.
On the other hand, the conditions that drove these frustrations many years ago still exist: internal issues with hiring, employment, and equality; products developed with questionable value and legitimate risks to society; and lucrative contracts with repressive regimes and militaries around the world. In many ways these problems have worsened.
One of the groups keeping these fires of activism aflame is Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ). Founded during the first peak of employee dissent in 2019, the group is still fighting to hold Amazon to account for a series of goals the company set around emissions and environmental justice. Their work has had an impact; on the eve of planned protests in 2019, Jeff Bezos held a surprise press conference and announced a climate pledge, committing the company to net-zero emissions by 2040.
But amid the A.I. boom, the company has been moving in the other direction, the AECJ believes. This week, they released a sharply worded letter for employees to sign to demand that the company do more to ensure its adoption of A.I. is made with both the environment and its workers in mind. The 1,000-word missive is worth a read. With extensive hyperlinks and references, it meticulously lays out the case that, in its words, Amazon is dismissing climate goals in the A.I. race, pushing workers to use A.I. while simultaneously conducting layoffs, increasing internal pressure, and helping speed the construction of a militarized surveillance state alongside other tech companies in the U.S.
“All of this is daunting, but none of it is inevitable,” the letter reads. “A better future is still very much within reach, but it requires us to get real about the costs of AI and the guardrails we need.”
I reached out to Eliza Pan, one of the co-founders of AECJ, to talk. Pan worked at the company for six years before leaving to work full-time with the activist group. We spoke this week about the origins of the letter, what the group discovered when digging into data about Amazon’s emissions, and how employee activism is different in the “hard tech” era. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation is below.
Hard Reset: This letter is the AECJ’s biggest public action since a walkout in 2023. Where did the idea for it come from?
Eliza Pan: We were seeing a combination of things happening with Amazon going back on its climate promises because of its buildout of A.I. data centers. Our networks [at the company] were reporting that they were being mandated and strongly encouraged to use A.I., even when it didn’t necessarily make sense. We started asking questions like, why is this happening?
Last year was the five-year anniversary of [Amazon’s] climate pledge. We were looking into what Amazon’s progress has been since the pledge. We spent a lot of time digging into the data. What we found is that Amazon was really starting to go backwards on this climate pledge. Last year when we were looking into this, Google and Microsoft had both publicly came out and said, ‘Hey, our emissions are going up because of A.I. data centers.’ And Amazon publicly said, ‘Our emissions are flat.’ And that was really fishy, right? Is Amazon, which was also investing hugely in building data centers, really just that much better than Google and Microsoft? When we dug into the numbers, we saw that Amazon was able to claim that their emissions were basically flat through creative accounting. That’s when we realized that Amazon was really throwing out its climate promises for data centers.
HR: What were they doing to obscure that?
EP: One of the things was using renewable energy certificates. Amazon was claiming worldwide that they had achieved 100% renewable energy for their operations. When we dug into it, what we found is that in the U.S., only 22% of Amazon’s data centers are actually powered by renewable energy.
The way that they were able to make up that difference is through the use of renewable energy certificates. There are high-quality RECS, as they’re called, that actually result in what’s called additionality, which means because you bought these RECS, new renewable infrastructure was built that wasn’t already planned to be built. But Amazon was buying low-quality RECS that did not have that guarantee of additionality. And so they were just buying up these certificates of the available renewable energy that was already in the market. And most of the time, they were not adding new renewable capacity, at least not to the same degree that they were adding data center power demand.
We also saw another thing that raised red flags for us, which is we found out that Amazon had helped kill legislation in the state of Oregon where Amazon has a number of data centers. [At Amazon] we were all told that Oregon is the sustainable data center region. It’s got lots of renewable energy. But the state of Oregon has renewable energy targets for their public utilities to reach, and there was legislation that would’ve required data centers to be held to the same standards. But Amazon killed it.
HR: From your vantage, has the climate for activism changed in tech?
EP: It’s nuanced. When we first started, it was really all about how our leadership claims to have these values, so let’s make sure we live up to them. And I do believe during that era, they did feel that pressure.
Fast-forward to today, I think what we’re seeing is that our senior leaders have made the calculation that it is no longer politically expedient for them to live up to those values. We’re seeing that the mask is off. Leaders have either been lying this whole time that they’ve had those values, or they think that other things are more important than those values — namely, their ambitions around winning the so-called A.I. race and calculations that they need to work with the [Trump] administration. Even though they’re selling it as a technological race, what we see is that it’s actually a land grab and a resource grab for these data centers. And they have made the calculus that they need the federal government to support them in this grab.
What people are seeing now is a loss of trust and disillusionment — a distrust of senior leadership. And so the challenge now is, how do we call that out?
HR: Are the mechanics of organizing more difficult now?
EP: There’s definitely more fear now because of the climate, both because of layoffs and the general fear.
But while there’s more fear, there’s also a lot more clarity about what is at stake and who is responsible. Senior leaders and this administration are driving us off a cliff. What we have to all ask ourselves is where is my line? And once that line has been crossed, what am I willing to do about it?
What we’re saying is that it is a scary time. But we are not asking anybody to go out on a limb by themselves and try to take this on. What we’re trying to do is build collective power, because we’re so much more powerful when we work and speak together. Humans have been able to do incredible things when we come together. We’re not asking anybody to self-sacrifice, to put themselves out there and take on everything by themselves. We’re offering a way to band together with people who feel very deeply that this is not the world that we should be building, not only for ourselves, but for our kids.
HR: Have you changed any of your tactics or security procedures?
EP: We do have security protocols; we’ve always taken security very seriously since the beginning. This is the first time we’re doing anonymous signatures, in response to the fear that people have. We do ask people when they’re signing that they give us their name so that we can verify that they really are an Amazon employee, but we will not be publishing names. Once we reach a thousand signatures, we plan to release people’s job titles and orgs.
HR: Thanks Eliza.
Here’s what else we’re reading this week:
The D.C. sandwich thrower, whom the administration initially tried to charge with a felony before settling on a misdemeanor for assault, was acquitted today. (AP)
An impressive and highly visual project, from European economist Francesca Bria, that very cooly and simply breaks down how the tech industry is trying to create sovereignty through digital infrastructure that is increasingly out of reach of the government. Spoiler alert: it’s threatening democracy here and in Europe.
OpenAI is seemingly test-ballooning the idea of getting federal backing for some of the inordinate spending that is going into the A.I. boom, amid continuing chatter about a bubble. Gary Marcus, who has a good, angry, succinct take in his Substack, predicted this nearly a year ago. He says a federal bailout of the wreckage from the A.I. bubble, should it ever pop, would make the bank bailout of 2008 look like child’s play:
Tell your congress person — today — that you don’t want your taxes used to bail out overhyping and economically shaky AI companies that spend far more than they earn. Workers, already feeling the knife from layoffs, should not be footing the bill. Get ahead of this before the too-big-to-fail bullshit becomes too-late-to-stop.
Marc Andreessen and the gutting of the CFPB (ProPublica)
Man, the climate really has changed. Conde Nast fired four staffers, from brands like Wired, Bon Appetite, and others, for confronting its head of HR over the shuttering of Teen Vogue. And bizarrely filed an NLRB complaint against them. (Semafor)
See you all next week.