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Amazon Backs Out of Climate Pledge, Deletes Shipment Zero Initiative Blogpost

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Posted on Friday, May 26th 2023 by scrum-treats

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-shipment-zero-gives-u...

174 comments

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@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by scrum-treats Archived Version: https://archive.ph/W7jUR. 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]. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35444181

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Prickle | Parent It's a shame really, false statements by corporations rarely get prosecuted. Corporate statements\speech needs to be regulated. There needs to be a law that holds them explicitly to any and all statements.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by readthenotes1 | Parent Why should corporations be held more accountable than any other person*?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by toomuchtodo | Parent Securities fraud and SEC Rule 10b-5 >"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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by wcunning | Parent See every Matt Levine column ever -- Everything is Securities Fraud. That is the actual interpretation of 10b-5 by the SEC and by the activist investor class (not meant as a denigrating term, merely descriptive of investors actively taking interest in their portfolio companies to the point that they sue over deceptive claims). I expect the lawsuit to follow, but might take a few months to file.

@ Sunday, May 28th 2023 by Phileosopher | Parent I'm not so certain about that. In the world of securities, civil lawsuits are a profit-making scheme. 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?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by anigbrowl | Parent Because they're not people. Frankly, I think false statements by individuals that constitute some sort of public commitment (for which they reasonably expect to receive praise, positive PR, or subsidies of some kind) should also be prosecutable. Lying and bullshitting for profit are far too well tolerated.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Prickle | Parent Why shouldn't they? 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by imgabe | Parent When are public individuals held accountable for their statements? Public figures lie constantly, they tell us there's WMDs in Iraq, that inflation is transitory, that an election was stolen, and on and on. They never get held accountable. How would you even begin to differentiate between people who are lying and people who are simply wrong? >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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Prickle | Parent >When are public individuals held accountable for their statements? "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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by imgabe | Parent >Nations have started legislating laws against falsehoods after all. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Prickle | Parent >Which nations? How? Who determines what is a "falsehood"? 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by jq-r | Parent Generally I agree with you but this is dangerous: >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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by bradjohnson | Parent >Nothing is stopping customers from holding corporations accountable, by taking their business elsewhere if they find a corporation to be unreliable. 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

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by imgabe | Parent There are very different things being talked about here as if they are the same. The original comment I replied to gave this example: >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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by bradjohnson | Parent I'm referring to the article, not a feature of a product. I consider profiting off of green-washing while simultaneously being one of the biggest contributors to pollution and then silently reneging on your carbon emissions target a "corporate misdeed". I think that all of the companies that set these public carbon emissions goals as PR should be held fully accountable for missing them.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by imgabe | Parent >I think that all of the companies that set these public carbon emissions goals as PR should be held fully accountable for missing them. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by bradjohnson | Parent >Then they simply wouldn't set any such goals. Why would they bother risking it? Good. At least then they're not profiting off of the climate crisis while taking no action.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by jeffbee | Parent I always felt this way about my "Terminator 2: The Ultimate Edition" DVD. Then they came out with another one? False advertising!

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Prickle | Parent In that case, I feel it would simply be the "Ultimate Edition" at that time. Not the ultimate edition for perpetuity, which would be theoretically impossible. (Unless we say it is the Ultimate DVD edition.) It would still be different from a statement like "Windows 10 is the final version of Windows".

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by listenallyall | Parent >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. What damages would you claim?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Grum9 | Parent One new PC for everyone without a TPM switch in their current system locked out of the windows 11 upgrade?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by brewdad | Parent So far they are still supporting Windows 10 for those customers. If that ceases, then you might have a claim.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by tcfhgj | Parent Supporting meaning only security updates

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Prickle | Parent In theory, we would force Microsoft to support Windows 10 for one lifetime. That would still qualify as the "Last Edition of Windows", just for your life. If not possible, then Microsoft should refund every single Windows 10 purchase, as well as all license fees stemming from that same claim.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by listenallyall | Parent But Microsoft would say, we now support 11, everyone got a free upgrade, it's better, therefore nobody is harmed.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Prickle | Parent That would definitely sounds like what they would say. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by listenallyall | Parent Who the fuck is Jerry Nixon? Again, they gave you a free upgrade. What exactly are your damages (and no, "Microsoft lied" is not damage)?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Prickle | Parent Jerry Nixon is a senior project manager at Microsoft. He made that statement to the press. >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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by listenallyall | Parent >Doesn't matter In civil court, damages are the only thing that matters.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Prickle | Parent Fraud is both a criminal and civil matter.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by listenallyall | Parent Then it seems your time would be better spent convincing your local D.A. to prosecute, rather than simply complaining to random people on the internet. Best of luck!

@ Wednesday, May 31st 2023 by readthenotes1 | Parent Actually, i was being sarcastic... 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

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by DoktorDelta | Parent Because corporations have a larger impact on the world than any other person*

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by mcbits | Parent Same reason governments should be held more accountable than any other person, if we're going by the "group of persons = person" definition of person.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by thechangelog | Parent Because they have vastly more resources, vastly more externalities and vastly more ability to make measurable change. And because their fiduciary duty is for profit and not a sustainable world, their accountability should be even higher.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by anticensor | Parent This is only the case in Sweden, and only for Aktienbolayet type companies. No other for-profit entity has a legally required fiduciary obligation to return profits.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by salawat | Parent Because they are legal fictions only suffered to exist in order to allow people to do risky things.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by saghm | Parent They can't be put in jail, given the death penalty, vote, or be taxed at the same rate as "any other person"; to turn the question around, what makes you presume that this is one of the cases where they should be treated like a person and not one of the ones where they're not, when there are numerous examples of both?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by newswasboring | Parent They have a lot more power than any person. More power, more responsibility.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by varenc | Parent Your link to the deleted blog post is wrong. Here's the real link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230122230554/https://www.about... 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)

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by varenc | Parent I tweeted at the article's author and they've now fixed their link as well :-)

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by dendrite9 Well I hope they don't change the Stadium name, that's how I knew they were serious.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by CaptainNegative This HN post has a misleading title (as of the time of this comment). 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).

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Retric | Parent In theory sure, except backing out of the more achievable short term pledges as they become relevant says really bad things about the more difficult longer term ones.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by cheeze | Parent I totally agree, but I do agree with the commenter that the title is pretty disingenuous.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by photochemsyn Looks like Amazon is also dragging its feet on moving to an all-electric local delivery fleet: 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by asdff | Parent Airlines seem to be more in favor of investing in biofuels for jets than to have them use some other energy source. A review: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2020.0011...

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by jabl | Parent To be honest, liquid hydrocarbons are a very good energy source when weight and volume is important, like aircraft. Battery-electric planes will likely become a thing for short range flights, but I'm having a hard time seeing how anything like the current level of long range flights would be compatible with a "zero carbon" society. Biofuels and synthetic fuels will allow a limited amount of long range flights though, so I don't think we'd need to give up on those entirely.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by PKop Awesome, good for them. More should oppose the insane climate propaganda and not cave to ideological mob pressure.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by andsoitis | Parent >insane climate propaganda In a nutshell, what is the climate propaganda?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by blooalien | Parent "Climate propaganda" is any statement that places environment, life, or literally anything else above the idea that our filthy rich overlords desperately need more money even if it kills us all. More money for the filthy rich is the only thing that matters in the entire Universe. If you believe otherwise, you're a filthy heathen heretic hippie tree hugger.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by smolder | Parent The ideology of wanting humans to not send themselves to extinction like we're doing to so many other species. How horrible!

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by monero-xmr | Parent Humans will not send themselves to extinction if the earth gets a few degrees warmer. That is the propaganda. We survived ice ages, and with our modern technology we will survive warming. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by smolder | Parent I didn't say we are all going to die. I still have hope that despite all the recalcitrant folks constantly bemoaning every attempt at collective action to curb the coming problems that we will survive. But it won't be thanks to said people crying "climate propaganda!" The attitude espoused by OP here is worse than useless. It's thanks to propaganda from ideologues who OPPOSE collective action on climate change that there are huge swaths of people who think it's not an issue at all, or some kind of commie plot. Stop the buffoonery, and stop demonizing people who want to prevent future suffering and ecological degradation.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by PKop | Parent We can't all make it either, that is utopian thinking. There will be winners and losers.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by smolder | Parent This is a non sequitur given what I wrote.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by ta8903 | Parent But we can try to minimize the number of losers.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by monero-xmr | Parent >I didn't say we are all going to die. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by smolder | Parent The nuance you and others are missing is that I didn't say it was a definite thing. I didn't even say it was likely. I implied that the ideology he was complaining about is made up of people who don't think we should accelerate towards extinction: not an extreme stance at all. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by vasco | Parent The stance is extreme because it's doomsday speak, of the kind only people on top of a box in the park used to say when I was a kid. Humans will be here, maybe less of us, on boats, in constant air-con personal pods, whatever, we'll figure something out. We're not going extinct any time soon unless someone decides to launch nuclear weapons.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by bradjohnson | Parent >It seems pretty clear you are implying we will literally go extinct because of global warming. This is crazy. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by somenameforme | Parent Hyperbole tends to push people away. I was quite active in climate causes about 20 years ago, in large part because I was young and felt that without imminent action the world would face catastrophic damage. This [1] article is just one countless of the time. It was reporting on a Pentagon climate report that the White House was trying to 'keep the public from seeing.' At the top, in bright yellow, the Guardian is reminding viewers that "This article is more than 19 years old." And the lede is "Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years." 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...

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by js8 | Parent IMHO, that sounds just like a burnout from activism, caused by cynical people who are "meh" about the issue. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by monero-xmr | Parent The problem is the doomsday prophesies are unfalsifiable. We are at the point now where questioning anything related to global warming is professional suicide. Experts have been telling us perpetually that "soon" we will be past the point of no return and we are doomed. The climate is so large, and so much data is collected, and experiments are impossible to conduct, that you can make a case for almost anything at no one can say you are wrong. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by waiseristy | Parent Of course the globe warming 3 degrees isn't going to cause human extinction. But it will kill hundreds of millions due to inevitable war and genocide over the changing landscape. 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

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by missedthecue | Parent Global warming is going to increase food supply because carbon is an input to photosynthesis. Several studies have shown that increased carbon in the atmosphere increases crop yields and increases water usage efficiency by reducing plant transpiration. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by waiseristy | Parent >For wheat and soybean crops, in terms of yield the median negative impacts are fully compensated, and rice crops recoup up to 90 percent and maize up to 60 percent of their losses. 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

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by oblio | Parent You're missing the point. Many places won't be able to grow food anymore, not in sufficient quantities. 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.

@ Saturday, May 27th 2023 by monero-xmr | Parent Plants like more carbon and more heat. Areas that are currently too cold to grow will become capable with longer grow cycles. We can enrich soil with fertilizer to make it better. 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.

@ Saturday, May 27th 2023 by acdha | Parent Those past changes were quite disruptive, causing malnutrition and death, wars, etc. The current rate of change is much faster so we should expect all of those to be worse because there are far more people alive now and neither humanity nor the ecosystem have much time to adapt.

@ Saturday, May 27th 2023 by monero-xmr | Parent I disagree - I think modern society, international trade, and communication systems make such disasters far, far less likely.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by ok_computer | Parent I'm against the hype that every storm is "omg gobal warming", getting a stream of existential dread in news headlines and personal discussions or posts is tiring. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by brewdad | Parent Humans didn't exist during the last Ice Age. We've never survived an Ice Age and you certainly can't say anything for certain about our future. Technology has gotten into this mess. We can hope it also brings our salvation but I wouldn't bet the species on it.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by monero-xmr | Parent Yes we did? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by userbinator | Parent That's what they want you to believe. Harnessing fear itself has proven to be a powerful tool of controlling the masses. Realise the truth and it will set you free.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by smolder | Parent This has strong Poe's law vibes. If you're serious: pretend I sent you an eye-roll emoji.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by PKop | Parent Whichever group/nation abstains from consuming better energy sources will just get run over by the the nations that don't make that mistake. ESG et all are national suicide pacts, look at Europe. They are declining, and will be a weaker power as they use less energy than their competitors. Human history and the human condition is conflict and competition, you have to win the game against others, not voluntarily lose it.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by smolder | Parent This is kind of a shallow take. Building for sustainability makes a nation STRONGER in the face of declining resources. It's investing in the future.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by steve_adams_86 | Parent In a global system like the one we have, is there really only one game to play in order to succeed?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by specialist | Parent Transitioning from natural gas to renewables will make Germany weaker?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by nixass | Parent No but moving away from nuclear power will.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by specialist | Parent Just checked and yes indeed, the German govt has and will continue to shut them down. Darn. 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 https://www.volts.wtf/p/germanys-current-energy-situation

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by missedthecue | Parent There is no threat of extinction, this is silly.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by MentallyRetired | Parent YES, let the fascism wash over us. More profit. Forget the people and the polar bears. As long as the imaginary bank account number grows and grows and we're beating the other rich people, none of that stuff matters. We're building a rocketship anyways and we won't be here much longer. We'll leave them all gasping for air in the wake of our plumage. Yesssss Bezos Yes.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by harry8 | Parent Yeah look there's nothing in the above I'm actively disagreeing with here. What I am disagreeing with is the way you've said that. It isn't productive. It doesn't shed any light on things. It doesn't assume the best of the person you're replying to. It goes nowhere. There's plenty of other places where this kind of response is welcome. Also @dang will get cross and we can't have that.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by js8 | Parent There is this liberal idea (nicely explained in https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) that all disagreements are about facts, i.e. if we all understood reality well enough, we would surely agree (mistake outlook). But some disagreements are about values. That's the conflict outlook. In this case, some people simply value ecological future more than short-term profit.

@ Saturday, May 27th 2023 by harry8 | Parent There are as many different ways of disagreeing as there are pairs of people. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by xracy What? No! But they super-duper pinky promised. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by chii | Parent They managed to get the PR benefits from having made the pledge, and the news cycle has moved on from it.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by asdff | Parent Great day to do it too, I just googled AMZN to see if anythings been written and articles about Nvidias big day are coming up instead.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by skwb I live in the Seattle area now, and I find it hilarious that the public transportation infrastructure around Climate Pledge Arena (which Amazon bought the naming rights for) is horrendously bad. My wife and I looked into taking the subway + somehow transferring to the monorail, only to see that service was super limited by the time the concert finished. We end up parking nearby since it's cheaper/easier to do so. Completely the worst set of incentives.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by tomcam | Parent Is Amazon responsible for Seattle public transit in return for naming rights or something? Not following your logic.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by whatever1 | Parent Tech population grew faster than the infrastructure in the wider Seattle area. Especially after the return-to-office mandates from the companies, traffic is at LA levels. 1-2 hour 1-way commutes are common.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by influx | Parent If only we had a city council and state government that cared about the environment and priorities public transport...

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by mbgerring | Parent If only we had meaningful state capacity in the US, and didn't depend on the whims of wealthy individuals

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by hackernewds | Parent If only we cared less about those without wealth and power, and bulldozed our way over these helpless communities like other countries with solid public transportation have done.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by sofixa | Parent That's mostly an American thing (bulldozing the poor away to build infrastructure, mostly highways). 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by reaperducer | Parent Americans on HN like to pretend that transit is a magical unicorn fairy dream in other countries, especially Europe. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by sofixa | Parent >Americans on HN like to pretend that transit is a magical unicorn fairy dream in other countries, especially Europe. >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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by caskstrength | Parent People in states (outside of enclave of European hipsters in NYC) still haven't heard about Asian and European tricksters building train lines _underground_. Understandable, since this is quite a recent invention...

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by katbyte | Parent Heck even here in Vancouver we've done a bunch of cut and cover under roads - it's disruptive but it works without tunnel boring

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by WalterBright | Parent In Seattle, we buy a $$$$$$ boring machine, bore a tunnel, and then cut up the machine and sell it for scrap. Nobody ever thinks "hmm, now we have a perfectly good boring machine sitting at the end of a tunnel in the middle of the metropolitan area. Hey, I have an idea! Let's continue boring and extend the tunnel!" My favorite was when they bored a new tunnel downtown, and stuffed the resulting rubble into the Battery tunnel, thus providing 0 extra capacity for $$$$$$. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by shafyy | Parent I can't understand how Europeans built all these tunnels centuries before Elon Musk invented tunnel boring a few years ago? /s

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by jen20 | Parent Sounds a lot to me like how Americans built roads. I can't imagine you don't actually know this.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by throwawaylinux | Parent Corporations lobby to back and influence local government to rubber-stamp their plans without requiring the necessary services and infrastructure to be in place or paid for. Don't try to put it in the voters' lap.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Tyrek | Parent if only local government and voters had agency to oppose such influences.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by swexbe | Parent "Stop hitting yourself"

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by throwawaylinux | Parent They do, and the process is not always robust enough to counter corporate lobbying and political corruption.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by balls187 | Parent I regularly go to events at CPA and use public transport (which is free for anyone with a ticket to a CPA event). 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by manacit | Parent I live down in the south end and have taken the train + monorail more than once to a concert at Climate Pledge without issue, absolutely no issues. The Monorail takes Orca now, and the transfer at Westlake is not bad at all. I would highly recommend giving it a try.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by icelancer | Parent Yeah, I agree. There's a decent bit to complain about RE: bus routes (lol Northgate to Ballard being impossible somehow) but public transportation in Seattle is largely pretty good. I commuted downtown daily on various bus lines before the light rail was a thing, and when I go downtown now from South Seattle, the light rail is quite solid. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by 93po | Parent I also recently did just this without any problems. A minor wait after the Kraken game for the monorail, but I took my sweet time getting there and it was only a 10-15 min wait.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by lchengify | Parent I live in the area. Theoretically the West Seattle / Ballard link extensions will include stops at Seattle Center (park between the Space Needle and Climate Pledge Arena). 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...

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by hackernewds | Parent That ETA is hilarious. Hope we have a planet worth redemption by the

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by dag11 | Parent We get quarterly pamphlets in the mail by Sound Transit detailing the latest updates on the subway construction projects and reading these pamphlets is one of the few moments where I really confront the concept of mortality. The years annotated on certain lines opening stretch into the mid 2040s! 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by culturestate | Parent > 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by noobermin | Parent Just to add insult to injury here, the circle line is fully operational as a semi circle, it just is not a full loop yet. That's all that's meant by completetion here, so yes, we have a mostly new line in a little under 15 years in sg for that.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by WalterBright | Parent Construction crews nearby spent 3 years redoing a 2 mile stretch of 2 lane road. 3 years of detours and one lane with flaggers. Now that it's done, it's still 2 lanes. It boggles the mind.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by badwolf | Parent unfortunately NIMBY's gonna NIMBY. There's currently a petition going around to block BRT because it would take away... a lane of parking and "ruin small businesses." 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by rtpg | Parent Seattle should be ashamed at giving themselves 10 years just for planning + design. This isn't the linear shinkansen, you're not even crossing state lines! It is a train. We know how to do this. There are obviously considerations to optimise for but how do you need 5 years for planning, _then another 5 years for design_?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by panda888888 | Parent I agree that they should do it more quickly, but they aren't just building this line, they're building light rail lines throughout all of Seattle and the suburbs. There's a giant master plan that goes 25+ years all the way out to 2050ish.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by rcme | Parent Modern civil engineering is extremely inefficient. In a software system, for instance, you design largely by "instinct." You're given a problem, you consider a the pros and cons of a few possible solutions, and then commit to one based on these considerations. Civil engineering doesn't work like that. For something like a road or a railway, they'll split it into pieces and then consider every possible way of construction along each segment, including studying things like environmental impact. It takes a ridiculous amount of time and effort. Part of the reason for this is so that when people sue to block construction they can say they considered all the other alternatives.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by cornercasechase | Parent It's been a lot longer than 10 years. The empty, massive, underground bus/train "depot" that sits under the downtown has multiple track gauges running through it from all the failed projects.

@ Saturday, May 27th 2023 by c22 | Parent Are you talking about the old convention place station?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by helen___keller | Parent Seattles still one of the most capable American cities in regards to constructing transit. Boston began planning a 4 mile line extension in 2006, completed 2022[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Line_Extension

@ Saturday, May 27th 2023 by apple4ever | Parent I always marvel at all of these ETA's. They're building a train station near me and take them 4 years to build it! For a train station! Skyscrapers go up faster than that! I don't get it.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by cantaloupe | Parent Downtown Seattle's not that big. Walking from Westlake (light rail) to Climate Pledge is 20-25 minutes, no transfer needed.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Aeolun | Parent I don't know about you, but 20 minutes sounds like quite a walk. It's absolutely possible, and can be done for fun, but if your main goal is going to a concert tacking on another 40 minutes walking may be mildly frustrating.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by cantaloupe | Parent That's fair, although people often underestimate the time "more convenient" options take. For example, walk 2 minutes to a bus, wait 5 minutes, ride 5 minutes, walk 3 minutes to destination. Not too much faster. Happens all the time with cars in the city. Spend 5 minutes looking for parking that ends up being a 5 minute walk away, and a 10 drive is now a 20 minute transit.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by dag11 | Parent With the amount of rain we get (or just cold or brisk or misty weather in general) for 3/4 of the year, even if the transit option is only 16 minutes (inclusive of the bookend walks, according to Google Maps), it's still infinitely preferable to walking 20 minutes in that weather.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by wiml | Parent We rarely get the kind of rain that's unpleasant to walk in. If you have a hat or jacket you'll be fine.

@ 10 hours ago by dag11 | Parent I have a fantastic, well-fitting rain shell, and comfortable waterproof shoes. Rain is absolutely no problem for me, but the general inconvenience of it all (wet exterior, wet face, etc) and temperatures are still enough to make me vastly prefer the transit option compared to a slightly longer walking option.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by brewdad | Parent How long will it take you to get out of the parking garage after the show? I haven't been to Climate Pledge but I've easily spent 15 minutes waiting to leave a garage after a 3000 attendee stage show.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Aeolun | Parent Were you sitting in a comfortably air conditioned car, instead of being drenched out walking 20m in the rain?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by kelnos | Parent Another? A 20-minute walk tacking on another 40 minutes to your trip would only be the case if you can drive there in zero minutes, which... I think it's safe to assume is not the case. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Aeolun | Parent OP indicated that arriving by car they got there much faster. I assume they wouldn't have said that if their time finding a parking garage took up a large chunk of time. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by _huayra_ | Parent They even added a "reverse incentive": you can park in any of the Amazon garages for free after 4pm or any time on weekends (as long as you leave by 2am, and even then the charges are pretty cheap if you blow past the deadline).

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by seanmcdirmid | Parent The rapid bus D line goes straight there if you live in Ballard. That will be replaced by a light rail when I'm retired. We go to Seattle center a lot, though never for the arena. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by verst | Parent I live in Ballard and frequent the D and 40 buses to get to Seattle center or downtown. Uber / Lyft are insanely expensive now, and I have a zero alcohol policy when I'm driving.

@ Saturday, May 27th 2023 by seanmcdirmid | Parent The D is crazy, the 40 can be less so. Another option is link + 44 in the U district, sometimes it's only 5 minutes slower.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by lynx23 | Parent >cheaper/easier to do so 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by charles_f Honestly, at this stage, if it doesn't align directly with increasing the baseline on the short term, it's hard to see any sort of pledge from large companies as anything more than PR. Amazon backed out, but they could very well have done like the others and buy bullshit carbon offset credits - I guess the math on their tax deductions didn't work. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | Parent I mean if the company market cap is skyrocketing and they're making money hand over fist, I think you can read any pledge as "we pledge to do this thing as long as the money continues to pour in at the current rate or better." Whenever revenue starts contracting, all the old promises are basically empty words.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by vasco | Parent Same way if it gets cold, or food is missing from the supermarket everyone will temporarily stop caring about the environment. Priorities are there for a reason.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by ohthehugemanate | Parent I think microsoft is the only large hyperscaler that seems to take this as more than a shallow PR push. Their goal is carbon zero by 2030 - not net zero, but actually removing as much carbon from the atmosphere as they put in. They pay for actual carbon removal and help develop that tech in order to get there. And their targets are all three classes of emissions (ie including indirect emissions) which no other tech company even talks about. That's recognized within the carbon monitoring industry... I think they're on the CDP A list for carbon for the third year in a row now? (Amzn and goog have never been there) 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by fomine3 | Parent Microsoft also bet for nuclear fusion. I wonder are both really work by 2030 or scam.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by drivebycomment | Parent Alphabet is also on CDP A list for climate in 2022, and they have the similar commitment for zero carbon by 2030. I don't see significant enough difference in climate response regarding between Azure and GCP.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by jbm | Parent If you look at my post history, you will see a lot of angry posts about Teams and other Microsoft products, but after reading this I'm probably going to take it easier on them. Legitimately turned me around on them, thanks for sharing.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by zelphirkalt | Parent That is nice and great if true. However, what if I moved the goalpost just tiny bit to include all the emissions, that MS' ever more resource demanding OSes and the bad engineering and unwanted stuff inside them causes? That would include the emissions and environmental harm caused by not too technical people being forced to buy new computers every 3 years, because their old ones become unbearably slow by normal usage or become slow due to being tricked into upgrading to the next Windows version, which is more demanding on the hardware. MS would probably be bankrupt soon, if they paid for repairing that damage to the environment.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by alfor Let corporation be greedy and honest about it. Regulation/incentives and even more technology is going to move the needle, not some greenwashing initiative.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by renewiltord This shit is pointless. It doesn't move the needle with consumers (who are price conscious above all) and activists (who require purity). If you give in to activists a little you will be punished harder than if you do nothing at all primarily because activists don't want an outcome so much as they want to be activists. Given this, serve your customers at all costs. The environment is something you can deal with later.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by PeterStuer 'Net Zero' as all the 'offset' based schemes are greenwashing accounting shenanigans designed to avoid having to really restrain your emissions.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Gigachad | Parent It's so crazy when you dig in to it. Take some protected forest, then claim "uh actually we are going to bulldoze this unless you buy our carbon credits" then vastly over calculate how much carbon is stored, sell it off as credits for not bulldozing it, and then a few years later, sell the same forest again for credits. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by aae42 | Parent What's even funnier is when they sell the carbon credit for huge swaths of land that are completely unbuildable and will never really be bulldozed ever... Yea it's a carbon sink, but it'll always be one. There's no way to get ahead

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by lozenge | Parent Yes, actual net zero would involve removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is impossible at the scale these companies require. The equipment doesn't exist beyond a few tiny demonstration projects, and if it did it would cost 100x what the companies want to pay. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by knallfrosch | Parent I've found out that I can fly 1,000 times net zero per year if I offset that by not flying another 1,000 times. It's that simple.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by iLoveOncall Can dang fix the absolute bullshit editorialized title? They did not back out of the climate pledge at all, even the bullet points below the main picture say so: "The company is rolling the goal into a broader Climate Pledge."

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by LatteLazy At this point, individual, corporate and even national actions are totally pointless. It's a binding international agreement or we all just do our own thing.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by eb0la One of the reasons I quitted Amazon Prime was ecology. My neighborhood is plagued with Amazon delivery vans. They are everywhere, double parked, which makes traffic a mess in a place that used to be a quiet neigborhood. I am sure Amazon has no idea about how many CO2 they emit, since most of them are freelance contractors. But since they don't pay much, they have no low emission vehicles, and makes the rest of the people emit more CO2 since they double park everywhere.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by curiousgal | Parent It's funny because, if anything, this post highlights the futility of consumer-level actions. One corporate action can have the effect of all individual actions of thousands of people over their entire lifetime.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by rtpg | Parent I somewhat understand the nihilism at play here, but it's not like those trucks exist absent consumer demand. They aren't driving around for fun! 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by tcfhgj | Parent Well, except sometimes they are (not really though): https://www.ksta.de/ratgeber/verbraucher/retouren-bei-zaland... Returned items were transported at least 7000km and up to 29.000km within Europe

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by pnt12 | Parent On the other hand, consumers have little control over businesses. I'd be fine with eco friendly delivery, eg more wait time to minimize trips in the neighborhood, electric cars, etc. Most of the time I'm sitting on a full online cart for days, and removing stuff I don't really need until I'm happy with the order: I can wait. But where's that option?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by mulmen | Parent Sounds like Amazon Day. https://www.amazon.com/amazonday

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by rcme | Parent Having N people drive to your neighborhood could be more efficient than M people driving to the store individually if M >> N. So now when you want something you drive to the store? How is that better?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by aubanel | Parent I think the key difference is that in the absence of fast delivery, when you need something, you'll just wait a bit until you have more things to buy. So you'll do one trip to the store for 10 items. Plus you'll go to other places on the way (and meet people but that's another aspect). So the real number is not M but M // 10. 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.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by rcme | Parent Does it really matter if the delivery driver is going to be on your street anyway? Or put another way, imagine you live on a street with 10 households. On average, one household might drive to store each day to pick up 10 items. Isn't it nearly the same efficiency if one person drives from the store to your street once a day to make deliveries to some / all of the households?

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by ChatGTP | Parent I just quit my prime over this news. I was not really buying much from Amazon, I have a list of stuff I need and when it gets big enough I go get it all from local stores so support them. I was kind of keeping prime for the TV and because of their eco pledge. Now that's gone. I'm not longer a customer, and I couldn't care less about it.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by myshpa The wrong Amazon is burning.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by strus Carrying about climate was the zero interest rate phenomenon.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by Traubenfuchs I would expect anyone radical enough to care about this probably doesn't order from Amazon anyways.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by TheLoafOfBread Companies are starting to figure out that being carbon neutral is expensive. Something what regular people have figured out long time ago.

@ Friday, May 26th 2023 by solarkraft | Parent It should be less expensive than emitting carbon

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