Amazon Employees for Climate Justice is calling out the tech giant for what it says are misleading claims about its use of renewable energy.
First off there’s no such thing as 100% clean or renewable power. Solar panels are metals (mined with petroleum powered equipment and probably refined in China using coal) plus petroleum products (plastics etc). They’re shipped around on trucks and boats, and if they’re burnt to remove the petrolium products before extracting the metals when they’re ‘recyced’ then it’s literally burning fossil fuels.
Not only that but they’re buying RECs. The power they’re consuming could very well be 100% generated by coal, but they gave a few bucks to somebody who had solar or wind.
100% clean no, but 100% renewable is theoretically possible.
If the electric grid entirely eliminates fossil sources of energy, and the supply chain electrifies, and if the extraction equipment electrifies, and if the storage facilities are run off non-fossil fuel energy, and the manufacturing facilities, and everyone involved didn’t consume or use cattle products because of their methane emissions, and all buildings are wooden construction, and all polymers are plant-based, etc etc, then one could say a company uses 100% renewable energy.
But for practicality’s sake, 0% fossil fuel-generated electricity and heating is a good metric to call “100% renewable” for most things. If a manufacturing process inherently produces GHGs like portland cement concrete, you can adjust the definition appropriately.
And yes cap and trade strategies and whatever else are bs