Dear Hazel,
Amazon runs on dirty energy — and that means thousands of websites, from Netflix to Spotify, are running on coal,
natural gas, and nuclear energy.
That’s because Amazon, in addition to being one of the world’s largest retailers, has a huge business providing web
hosting for thousands of companies including massive bandwidth users like Netflix.
Cloud services like those that Amazon provides to Netflix and Spotify consume more energy than most
countries in the world — only China, the U.S., Japan, India, and russia use more each year.
The handful of Internet companies that use the majority of that cloud space have an especially large impact on the
types of energy we use. Already, companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple have recognized the impact their
energy use makes and have committed to 100% renewable energy policies for their data centers.
Amazon, however, hasn’t even budged — and it’s time it starts using renewables.
Tell Amazon: Stop using fossil fuels to power your web services. Click here to automatically sign the petition.
In the last three years, dozens of Internet companies have committed to stop using fossil fuels and power their data
centers with 100% renewable energy — largely due to a successful campaign by our friends at Greenpeace.
Apple, Facebook, and Google all have explicit long-term goals of using 100% renewable energy, and all have taken
major strides to make that a reality. In the last three years alone Apple has gone from using 35% renewable energy to
75%, putting Apple on the path to being one of the largest renewable energy users in the country.
Part of the reason the commitment has spread so rapidly is that tech companies want to stay on the cutting edge —
so when industry leaders started going renewable, others have quickly followed.
Now, Amazon is the only one of the three largest Internet companies that hasn’t budged, continuing to use a mix
of coal, natural gas, and nuclear to power its web services — which are the infrastructural cornerstone for
thousands of Internet companies, including behemoths like Netflix, Spotify, Pinterest, and Vine.
These commitments to renewable energy are more important now than ever, because as more and more information
is stored and exchanged digitally, the energy footprint of these data centers is only going to get larger — and if that
footprint is full of carbon, it’s going to mean more and more severe weather caused by climate change.
Tech companies are supposed to be at the cutting edge of innovation — and part of that is powering data centers with
renewable sources like wind and solar instead of dirty fossil fuels. Apple, Facebook, and Google have committed to it —
it’s time for Amazon to do the same.
Tell Amazon: Stop using fossil fuels to power your web services. Click here to automatically sign the petition.
Thanks for fighting fossil fuels,
Charlie Furman, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets
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Learn more about this campaign
1. Clicking Clean, Greenpeace, April, 2014.
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