Amazon gets failing grade from carbon monitor
Retail giant one of few firms still refusing to participate in Carbon Disclosure Project
SEATTLE— Many global corporate giants have been sharing their data on carbon emissions with CDP, a nonprofit that gathers information on behalf of big institutional investors worried about how their assets will fare in a warming world.
But Amazon.com, unlike many of its rivals, keeps those cards close to the chest.
CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project, queries companies about carbon emissions and other data every year to build what it says is the most detailed collection of self-reported environmental information anywhere.
About 70 per cent of companies listed in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index contributed data to its latest report, published in late October, said CDP’s North America president, Lance Pierce.
That includes rivals of Amazon’s wild diversity of businesses, from behemoth retailers Wal-Mart and Costco Wholesale to Microsoft and Alphabet. Not everybody gets a good score.
CDP grades companies based on a combination of factors, from the level of transparency to how much they do to address problems.
Apple made it to the A list; so did Microsoft and Alphabet. Wal-Mart got a B and Costco scored a C. But CDP slapped an F on Amazon for nonparticipation (the company hasn’t responded to the questionnaires since at least 2010).
Amazon declined to comment on its refusal to play ball with CDP’s request for openness.
The rating comes at a time when the Seattle juggernaut’s ballooning size invites increased scrutiny from investors and regulators.
Amazon was the largest U.S. publicly traded company not to participate (it jostled for that title with Facebook and Berkshire Hathaway, which also got Fs).
Moreover, Amazon’s fast-expanding warehouse and logistics operations, as well as its power-hungry data centres, could become growing sources of carbon emissions, which scientists say have contributed to climate change.
Investors interested in corporate carbon-emissions data “are not asking for it because they don’t have anything better to do,” Pierce said in an interview. “They believe it’s material.”
Amazon is “notable for the fact that it’s holding out in a space where clearly everyone else that is working with it and probably competing with it are in the process of disclosing,” Pierce said.
There’s plenty of evidence Amazon factors the environment into its worldview.
It is building wind farms and solar arrays it says will generate enough power to meet half the needs of its data centres by next year, and eventually will cover all its cloud-computing energy requirements with renewables.
In Seattle, it will harness heat from a local data centre to power its new downtown buildings.
The company is a signatory of the American Business Act on Climate Pledge, a White House initiative that supported action on reducing carbon emissions, and has struck many other environmentally minded partnerships.
Amazon also seems to be building a sustainability team under Kara Hurst, who joined the company in 2014.
She’s the former CEO of the Sustainability Consortium, a nongovernmental organization focusing on sustainable consumption.
At the beginning of the month, there were more than 29 jobs open related to sustainability, ranging from software-development engineers to senior product managers focusing on waste reduction for packaging.
But Amazon keeps a veil on details that other companies share. For example, it doesn’t publish a comprehensive annual sustainability report, unlike many peers. A proposal by shareholders to issue such a document garnered only 25-per-cent support at last May’s annual shareholder meeting.
Amazon’s board said that, since it is already committed to developing sustainable practices, working on an annual report “would not be an effective and prudent use” of time and resources.