How Green is Amazon’s Future?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2019
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A growing contingent of Amazon employees has been pushing the company to be a leader in the fight against climate change. Recently, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos promised to reduce carbon emissions and add thousands of electric trucks to the company’s fleet. Activist employees hope that’s just a beginning.
Guest: Louise Matsakis, staff writer for Wired.
Podcast production by Mary Wilson, Jayson De Leon, Danielle Hewitt, and Mara Silvers.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We are getting a slew of headlines out of Amazon. |
| 0:07.0 | For that, we're going to go to Dom Chu. |
| 0:08.7 | A few weeks back, Amazon's president and CEO, Jeff Bezos, walked into the National |
| 0:14.6 | Press Club to a room full of reporters and dramatically pulled down a curtain, revealing the words the climate pledge, |
| 0:23.4 | Paris, 10 years early. |
| 0:26.0 | He is pledging Amazon will be one of the first companies, about the first company, to meet |
| 0:30.3 | the Paris Climate Accords and Climate Pledges 10 years early by the year 2040, outlining |
| 0:36.1 | a number of steps. |
| 0:37.3 | Our actually social editor sent me a tweet, and it was Jeff Bezos, you know, a picture |
| 0:41.7 | of him and a quote about 100,000 electric vehicles. |
| 0:45.4 | And I was like, what is going on? |
| 0:46.8 | Louise Metzakis covers Amazon for Wired. |
| 0:49.4 | Also interesting here, the idea that they have said that they will order 100,000 new |
| 0:54.0 | electric delivery vans. |
| 0:56.0 | Our transportation reporters were like, that is so many electric vehicles. |
| 1:00.0 | Like that's, we've never heard anything like that before. |
| 1:02.0 | Like, Louise, you know what's going on? |
| 1:03.0 | And I was like, I have no idea what's going on. |
| 1:06.0 | For the last few months, Louise has been talking to Amazon employees, |
| 1:11.6 | engineers and product designers, people who've been pressuring Bezos to shift how he approaches climate change. |
| 1:19.6 | So as she watched this press conference, she says, it felt like he'd heard them. |
| 1:25.6 | You know, we've been in the middle of the herd on this issue, and we want to move to the forefront. |
... |
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