Amazon's Carbon Emissions Are Maybe Very High, That's Why Jeff Bezos Doesn't Want You To See It
Amazon has a tonne of server farms in Australia, all of which are chewing up energy on the national grid. And it seems there might be something fishy going on, because the company doesn¡¯t want details of its energy consumption and emissions published
Amazon has a tonne of server farms in its Australia datacenters, all of which are chewing up energy on the national grid.
And it seems there might be something fishy going on, because the company doesn't want details of its energy consumption and carbon emissions published.
According to documents seen by ABC, the company has submitted an application to the Clean Energy Regulator (CER), the local agency tasked with regulating carbon emissions. Amazon's application apparently requests the data on its energy consumption between 2017-2018 not be published, as it involves proprietary information that would make it tantamount to "giving away trade secrets".
Amazon first set up server farms for its AWS cloud platform in Australia back in 2012, and has added more regions since. As such, they're required by law to provide reports on their energy usage and greenhouse gas output under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting scheme.
However, though the report itself is redacted, the company is still claiming that publishing it would negatively affect their competitive edge. However, most experts believe the e-commerce giant is merely trying to protect itself from some very bad press.
In the most recent Greenpeace Clicking Clean Report (PDF) in 2017, Google and Microsoft scored an A and B respectively for their clean energy efforts. Amazon on the other hand scored a mediocre C. Worse, they also scored an F on their energy transparency rating.
"Section 25 of the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007? (NGER Act) permits corporations to apply to have information withheld from publication," the CER database entry for Amazon currently says. "Pending finalisation of their application to withhold their corporate emissions and energy data from publication, Amazon Corporate Services Pty Ltd's data is withheld from publication."
The question is, when and if it comes out, are we going to find horrific abuse of the environment and energy? Maybe Jeff Bezos was being prescient when he said Amazon only has five more years left to go.
