'One-day shipping won’t matter if our homes are under water,' Amazon workers tell Jeff Bezos

Amazon employees held placards, gave speeches and confronted their boss at the company’s annual meeting in Seattle on Wednesday, all to convince CEO Jeff Bezos to be as obsessed with the world’s climate crisis as he says he is with Amazon customers.

“One-day shipping won’t matter if our homes are under water,” one placard read.

The tech giant's data centers, warehouses and delivery vehicles make it one of the nation’s biggest energy users — and polluters.

Amazon user experience designer Emily Cunningham presented a shareholder resolution on behalf of a group called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.

“Before I start my time, I’d like to ask for Jeff Bezos to come out on stage so that I can speak to him directly. I represent 7,700 of his employees,” she said from the audience.

“Mr. Bezos will be out later, thank you.” Amazon’s general counsel David Zapolsky replied from the stage.

“Will he be hearing this speech?” Cunningham asked.

“I assume so,” Zapolsky said after a long pause.

With Bezos in absentia, Cunningham then presented arguments for Amazon to adopt a company-wide climate plan “matching the scale and urgency of the climate crisis.”

About 50 Amazon employees, dressed in white, stood up in support.

“Our home, planet Earth, not distant, far-off places in space, desperately needs bold leadership,” Cunningham said, in an apparent dig at Bezos’ recently announced plans for space colonies. “We have the talent, the passion, the imagination. We have the scale, speed and resources. Jeff, all we need is your leadership.”

Earlier this year, Amazon’s board of directors, chaired by Bezos, urged shareholders to reject the resolution. The board said it agreed that reducing fossil fuel use was important.

“Amazon is already doing this,” the board notified shareholders.

Shareholders complied, voting down the resolution, along with 10 others on Wednesday.

Outside the meeting, Amazon software engineer Rajit Iftikhar spoke of his fear for his aunts and uncles in low-lying Bangladesh, where millions of people have had to flee their homes from floods and rising seas.

“It is unacceptable for one of the richest companies in the world to continue to take half-actions as the consequences of its emissions put so many lives of the global poor at risk,” he said. “It makes me angry that this crisis can be solved if those who have power just took this problem seriously.”

Bezos, the company’s largest shareholder and the richest human ever, came on stage near the end of the meeting for a question and answer session.

“As employees, we want to be proud of the company we work for,” Amazon game producer Andrea Benavides said. She asked Bezos and his senior executives to commit to decarbonizing their company as fast as the latest climate science dictates.

Bezos sidestepped the request, saying Amazon has a lot of climate initiatives under way and that cloud computing and online shopping are inherently less polluting than their alternatives.

“Building your own data centers, very bad,” Bezos said. “Driving yourself to the store to pick up a gallon of milk or to do anything, very bad.”

“We’re building solar farms. We’re building wind farms. We’re working hard on renewable energy,” he said. “We’re putting solar cells on top of our fulfilment centers.”

Amazon set a goal in 2017 of installing solar panels on 50 warehouses--about 6 percent of its global network--by 2020.

Internal Amazon documents obtained by KUOW in 2017 revealed that Amazon Web Services’ green-energy purchases were being dwarfed by its rising use of dirty energy.

Amazon often touts its green initiatives but keeps its rising fossil fuel use under wraps, as a KUOW investigation revealed .

Amazon has a long-term goal of using only climate-friendly energy, but it has never said when it would try to achieve that goal.

“In my Amazon work, I know I’m always expected to have dates and milestones on my product plans,” software engineer Orion Stanger said to Bezos. “Jeff, what is the date for when we will achieve 100 percent renewable energy for all of Amazon’s operations?”

Bezos did not respond.

Unlike many big businesses, Amazon has never revealed its carbon footprint or a plan to pollute less.

The company has promised to do so some time this year.