Bezos Pledges to Meet Paris Climate Pact 10 Years Early

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced the formation of a new organization, the Climate Pledge, to meet the goals of the landmark Paris climate agreement 10 years early, according to Bloomberg.

In a joint press conference in Washington with Christiana Figueres, formerly the United Nation’s executive secretary for climate change, Bezos said Amazon will reach 80% renewable energy use by 2024 and 100% by 2030, up from 40% today. To help get there, Amazon has placed an order of 100,000 electric vehicles from a startup it has backed, Rivian Automotive. The first vehicles will arrive in 2021.

Bezos’s pledge came a day before more than 1,500 Amazon employees are scheduled to walk out of their offices to draw attention to what they see as the company’s inaction on climate change. The protest is part of a wider strike organized by 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg ahead of next week’s United Nations Climate Action Summit. “The global strike is totally understandable,“ Bezos said. “People are passionate about this issue. By the way, they should be passionate about this issue.“

The group organizing the employee walkout, Amazon Employees for Climate Change, has been pressuring Amazon for almost a year to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and detail how it’s preparing to deal with business disruptions caused by climate change. The company is relatively late among tech companies to share its environmental impact, experts say. Apple has released an environmental impact report with increasing levels of detail for the last decade. Google first published a comprehensive report on its energy use in 2011.