Strange to live in a world that failed to incentivise it's own survival.
You would think that trillion dollar companies like Amazon would care about not being able to operate at all in a few decades.
I get it from behavioral science why it all works like this, but one still wonders if it's the same for every other civilizations out there, if there are any.
> You would think that trillion dollar companies like Amazon would care about not being able to operate at all in a few decades.
Lawmakers are the issue, not big tech companies.
I know it’s popular to hate on big tech companies, but many of them are actually doing a lot more to improve the climate impact of their own operations than average or required by law.
Amazon has committed to switching to 100% renewable energy in the next few years and also going completely carbon neutral before the date proposed in the Paris Agreement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/planet/climate-pledge
I don’t understand why Amazon is the first target that comes to mind when they’re doing more than required to reduce their own and others climate impacts.
It’s not the big tech companies we need to be angry at. It’s the lawmakers who are failing to put appropriate regulations in place and the voters who continue to enable them.
Anytime a politician complains about companies not doing their part or not paying their taxes all I can hear is you can’t do your own job.
The first rule of leadership is that everything is your fault. If there’s loopholes, close them. If companies are polluting or emitting change the law.
The function of a company is to make money for it’s shareholders. The function of government is to keep them in check.
If there are two rival companies, and one of the two focuses on social initiatives to the detriment of it’s financial competitiveness, then logically the result is that it falls behind it’s less moral competitor until being crushed completely or subsumed.
In this scenario, you’re defacto punishing social initiatives rather than supporting them.
It’s illogical to expect companies to behave in a way that they’ll be punished for.
You clearly blame Milton Friedman.
I blame a political class with no morals or consequences for betraying their electorate. They’re at best too lazy to do what they’re paid to do and at worst utterly corrupt. Either way, they’re responsible.
Why would Amazon care more than others (which, in average, is not caring enough)? If anything, with the wealth/asset they have, they would likely do better than most of other company/people/entity when things went south.
Don't get me wrong, I wish they would, I just don't find it's hard to understand why they don't.
For what it’s worth, Amazon does care about doing more than required about climate change. They’re moving to 100% renewable energy within the next few years and funding alternative energy and sustainability research on the order of billions of dollars: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/about/the-climate-ple...
Amazon is investing quite a bit in this space.[1] It may not be enough by the UN committee estimates (edit: I think it actually is sufficient according to IPCC's scenarios [2]), but I don't think it's fair to say Amazon doesn't care.
[1] completely carbon neutral by 2040, carbon-neutral shipments by 2030, 100% renewable power for their operations by 2025, $2 billion pledged for decarbonizing tech, $100 million invested in reforestation
https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/.
Amazon is making a switch to low-carbon products and services because it makes sense economically. However the problem is that these solutions are often only low-carbon on paper. Reforestation and carbon capture are not feasible solutions either.
This is disappointing because in a few years companies will be sustainable on paper. This will make a coordinated effort to fight climate change even harder to achieve.
You can see Amazon not walking the talk on their political lobbying.
Perhaps you could expand on those points/cite some sources? It's just that Amazon's sustainability program looks quite reasonable (even better if it makes economic sense), and that they'll obtain neutrality 10 years before it'd be necessary by standards in the Paris agreement.
I don't know if your conclusions apply to a set of businesses s/Amazon/businesses in a broader sense, but it's hard to see how they apply to Amazon.
The former is a superset of the latter. Companies are political entities. At the most obvious level they are legal entities, and law is politics.
But the mistake here (and some other comments) of drawing "lawmakers", "politics", etc as being conceptually distinct from private corporations is particularly absurd from a historical view. The Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment forged political battles with substantial effort, debate, human cost that over centuries invented the concept you take granted as "companies", but which no other human civilization previous would have been familiar with. That there are "companies" at all is political, and so the OP is already pointing to a failure of politics.
Fossil fuels are an absolute cornerstone of the world geopolitical order. The US dollar is at least partly backed by oil in that the oil trade is used to ensure its dominance. You are not wrong but Amazon is not the influencer you should be thinking about. The link between oil and the political order is deeper than that.
> I get it from behavioral science why it all works like this, but one still wonders if it's the same for every other civilizations out there, if there are any.
I'm pretty sure that this is the great filter: a species evolving under the constraints of competition for resources inevitably fails as soon as it steps on the land mine of global dominance.
Joking aside; it's kinda tragic to see this happening. The worst thing about it is the willful blindness of many people that should know it better; we're at the brink of extinction and still people find ways to close their eye and go "lalala".
My take on it, this has been the status quo for 200 years. Native American Indians warned about this hundreds years ago. From the natural world it has been obvious for a looong time!
What makes you think that the world won't survive? Or are you talking about how the world is now? Sure, the world will be different, but is that a bad thing? Do you want the entities/policies/etc that caused the problem to continue in perpetuity, or would you rather the world change to address the circumstances it will find itself in?
Clarification Edit: I'm not being facetious/snarky. Otherwise I don't understand the downvotes as they don't provide any meaningful feedback in this case. I would appreciate feedback, thanks.
(I do believe in taking care of the environment etc, my line of questioning is mere curiousity, not trying to imply a worsing environment is a good thing.)
If you say that the current photo is not so bad, you are forgetting that you are seeing a movie, the very start of it. The next frame may not be so bad? That doesn't matter if the movie keeps running, you will get increasingly worse frames next, it won't magically stop because you want.
Think that the warming you are seeing is a second+ level consequence of our action. We emit GHG, the planet keeps more energy than the one it emits because the excess of GHG, the global average yearly temperature increases. Emitting less GHG will keep increasing that excess of GHG. Emitting zero will keep that excess in its place (because the carbon cycle last around 100 years or more). Doing a massive capture managing to do more carbon capture than what we emit will keep having an excess of GHG until we reach the preindustrial levels. All the way till that fantasy point the global average temperature will keep increasing.
And your emissions are not the main drive of that anymore. We reached already a lot of tipping points that triggered a lot of positive feedback mechanisms. Less ice means less albedo and so getting more heat from the sun. Hotter northern regions are releasing methane that were frozen there for millenia. Forest fires emits even carbon and cause even more heat. And there are several more.
And the problem is not just heat. It is energy to fuel extreme weather events, that happens from the equator to the poles. Is disrupting previously stable climate features that made the world livable as it were for thousands of years, the polar vortex seem to be disrupted, the atlantic ocean current seem to be going in the same direction too.
And we depend on more life, in direct and indirect ways. Agriculture doesn't mix well with extreme weather. We are in one of the biggest extinction events on Earth history. Its just not sustainable in the long term.
Thank you for taking the time to type out your response, I appreciate that you cared enough to help me. I understand all of what you wrote, and already agree with it. I wrote out a long response, but this isn't the place for the tangent.
The people who caused it will continue to thrive in and profit from the chaos. Why would climate change make them less powerful? They're best positioned to prepare for it.
Your comment seems to be at odds with the one I replied to stating "strange to live in a world that failed to incentivise it's own survival."
Either OP meant the whole world, or the circumstances which are leading to what is happening, which would include "the people who caused it". It would be difficult for the to "thrive in and profit" from it if they "failed to incentivise it's own survival."
Elon Musk comes to mind, not so much in doing anything about climate change but offering mitigations for those that can afford it. You can find doomsday preparations all across Tesla and SpaceX. From Bioharzard Mode to escaping to Mars.
And I guess the fund for the magic technology bullet that fixes everything exists too. Not that we have existing technology that would be carbon neutral.
Hey, we need to handle our existing nuclear waste anyway, might as well keep using it.
Mars isn’t a short term solution. The best we’ve had so far is a human in space for a year and he said it was hell. I can’t imagine mars would be any different, it will take a gigantic effort to construct a colony that is better than a climate-change-destroyed earth.
Not saying we won’t manage it eventually, I just don’t think it’s very likely in Elon Musks lifetime. Perhaps he should start with building a mars colony... here on Earth first. Some kind of habitat dome thing perhaps.
I agree. It takes a lot to create something that you know you likely won't see the fruits of. Its certainly a great thing to strive and work towards, but many people seem to think he'll have us on Mars in a decade such that we can just trash the earth because we won't need it anymore.
That is the problem with publicly traded companies. They exist a fiscal year at a time. No past on January 1, no future December 31st.
The underlying cause of this in western society is well explained in ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’ by John Ralston Saul. Good reading to understand our collective problem with some ideas on what to do about it. The answer isn’t clear.
I am not remotely religious, but it is a powerful force. Islam is the fastest growing religion, and while that alarms some people, it has a wonderful innovation that I think is key to our survival. Maybe it is from playing too many hours of Civ, but if I was playing with a pending climate catastrophe, I would double down on this:
‘Caring for the environment is an important teaching of Islam. The Qurʾān describes mankind as being stewards of the earth and therefore Muslims must care for the earth. It is our responsibility to care for the earth and environment. The reality of climate change requires us to rethink our lifestyles and actions and we must reflect on how our actions impact our environment. The Qurʾān highlights this point: Corruption has appeared on land and sea because of that which men’s hands have done (Q. 30: 41).‘
It's less obvious now maybe but for a while Amazon was pretty infamous for focusing on long-term investment and ignoring people's expectations for nice-looking numbers in annual reports.
And that's why the Saudis built a shiny golden city on top of the decaying corpses of dinosaurs? I'm sorry, but this can motivate individual action at best, and we really need the opposite.
The west bought the decaying dinosaurs that paid for the shiny city. I wouldn’t consider Saudi’s royal family to be particularly good example of anything but despots.
You would think that trillion dollar companies like Amazon would care about not being able to operate at all in a few decades.
I get it from behavioral science why it all works like this, but one still wonders if it's the same for every other civilizations out there, if there are any.