Environmental groups accuse Amazon of ‘distorting the truth’ in latest clean energy claim

Amazon announced Wednesday that it has achieved its goal of sourcing all of its energy from clean energy sources over the past year. If taken at face value, the announcement would mark a milestone Seven years ahead of schedule, which would be a monumental achievement. But environmental experts speaking to New York Timesincluding a group of concerned Amazon employees, warn that the company is “misleading the public by distorting the truth.”

The company’s claim to 100 percent clean electricity is based in part on billions of dollars invested in more than 500 solar and wind initiatives. The company’s logic is that the energy generated by these projects is equal to the electricity used by its data centers—ergo, even Steven.

But the renewable energy sources it uses for these calculations are fed into the general power grid, not just Amazon’s operations. Environmental experts warn that the company is using “accounting and marketing to make itself look good,” because New York Times put it down.

“Amazon wants us to think of its data centers as surrounded by wind and solar farms,” the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice said in a statement NYT“(But) the reality is that the company is investing heavily in expanding its data centers, using coal from West Virginia, oil from Saudi Arabia and Canadian shale gas.”

Clean energy experts say Amazon’s inclusion of renewable energy certificates (RECs) in its calculations could be highly misleading. That’s because if any power plants on the network burn fossil fuels, the companies have no way of knowing that the network is using only clean energy. A group of Amazon employees told New York Times that after the company’s use of RECs was subtracted from its calculations, its clean energy investment was “just a fraction of what was advertised.”

“Buying a lot of RECs doesn’t help,” said Leah Stokes, an assistant professor of environmental policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. NYT“You just have to invest in real projects.”

To be fair, any move toward clean energy should be applauded. Amazon still received a “B” rating from the nonprofit CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), which was lower than the “A” ratings of Google and Microsoft but still a passing grade. The problem comes when companies more often use the smoke and mirrors associated with marketing and PR to mislead the public into believing they are doing more for the environment than they actually are.

“A company needs to actually specify what sources it is including in this calculation,” said Simon Fischweicher, director of CDP NYT.

With the rapid rise of AI and financial pressure to compete in this new gold rush, companies are now reshuffling their cards and finding new ways to meet climate goals. But if this shift offers fewer tangible moves and more evasion and questionable logic, it creates a new problem on top of their supposed solutions to the real crisis.