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Amazon Shareholders Rejected Employees' Call to Respond to Climate Change
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Amazon Shareholders Rejected Employees' Call to Respond to Climate Change
#22I’ve been surprised by Amazon’s commitment to and progress in this area. I only recently learned that half of AWS was powered by renewable energy in 2018. That might not be good enough for these people, but I was pleasantly surprised.
Re: Amazon Shareholders Rejected Employees' Call to Respond to Climate Change
#23> In an emailed statement, Amazon outlined its sustainability initiatives and said, "Amazon’s sustainability team is using a science-based approach to develop data and strategies to ensure a rigorous approach to our sustainability work." The company also said, "We have a long term commitment to powering our global infrastructure using 100% renewable energy." In my experience, "using a science-based approach" translat…
Is that supposed to be a problem? Large data centers are strong candidates for renewable energy conversions because they need backup power regardless. If the "backup power" is supplied by renewables then that becomes the primary generation source and the power grid becomes the backup. Doing it that way is sustainable and profitable.
I would be very leery of a datacenter that didn't have their own on-site generation plants that can be guaranteed to supply power in the event of a grid failure. If a substation goes down on a cloudy day, I would hope that they have a big diesel generator or gas plant on standby regardless.
Re: Amazon Shareholders Rejected Employees' Call to Respond to Climate Change
#24Most shareholder resolutions are total jokes that get rubber-stamped by the large fund managers/executives and large individual shareholders who actually vote their shares. Despite increased access, due to ubiquitous internet access, only 27% of retail investors even bother to vote.[0] Plus, with an increasing concentration of assets managed by a small group of giant fund companies, this continues to become a bigger problem where the retail investors have little to no say.
Check out the AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch [1], can you imagine retail investors approving executive compensation to the rate of 200x or even 5900x (in the case of Weight Watchers) median employee pay? Those executive compensation votes usually pass without much more than a squeak from a couple of small investors or activist fund managers who typically get trounced when it comes time to vote.
Even if it's seemingly pointless, I always read the proposals and vote. It's also a great way to learn and get a sense of what's going on at the companies you are invested in.
[0] http://buzz.money.cnn.com/2014/06/12/shareholders-dont-vote/
Re: Amazon Shareholders Rejected Employees' Call to Respond to Climate Change
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corporations don't really care about clean and green outside of PR and legal requirements. If solar that generates real power all day without fuel is more profitable than an expensive diesel generator that sits there depreciating unused just waiting for the grid connection to crap out, they pick solar. And if it isn't but you want them to use it anyway, that's easy too -- put a carbon tax on that coal fired grid powe…
OK, I get it. > But don't expect them to choose to lose money while their competitors burn coal, undercut them and put them out of business because you decided that them doing that should be perfectly legal. The problem is that entrenched corporations more or less own governments, so they get the laws that work for them.
> The problem is that entrenched corporations more or less own governments, so they get the laws that work for them.
So what are you proposing to do about it?
Notice also that the corporations in this case are the fossil fuel companies, not the data center companies. To Amazon a marginal increase (if that) in energy costs to use solar is just something they get to mark up and pass on to the customer, as long as their competitors have to do the same thing. To oil and coal companies an effective carbon tax is ultimately the end of their business and they'll use every dirty trick in the book to try to prevent that.
So how do you get a much-needed carbon tax when it would cost oil and coal companies literally trillions of dollars and they'll fight that hard to prevent it? What's your proposal?
Re: Amazon Shareholders Rejected Employees' Call to Respond to Climate Change
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that supposed to be a problem? Large data centers are strong candidates for renewable energy conversions because they need backup power regardless. If the "backup power" is supplied by renewables then that becomes the primary generation source and the power grid becomes the backup. Doing it that way is sustainable and profitable.
I would be very leery of a datacenter that didn't have their own on-site generation plants that can be guaranteed to supply power in the event of a grid failure. If a substation goes down on a cloudy day, I would hope that they have a big diesel generator or gas plant on standby regardless.
The solution to that is to have enough solar to generate the power you need even on cloudy days, then sell the excess to the power company on normal days.
Re: Amazon Shareholders Rejected Employees' Call to Respond to Climate Change
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, I get it. > But don't expect them to choose to lose money while their competitors burn coal, undercut them and put them out of business because you decided that them doing that should be perfectly legal. The problem is that entrenched corporations more or less own governments, so they get the laws that work for them.
> The problem is that entrenched corporations more or less own governments, so they get the laws that work for them. So what are you proposing to do about it? Notice also that the corporations in this case are the fossil fuel companies, not the data center companies. To Amazon a marginal increase (if that) in energy costs to use solar is just something they get to mark up and pass on to the customer, as long as their…
First thing's first: stop pretending that "we the people" made the laws. If you can't recognize the problem, you certainly can't fix it.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
I don't think mirimir was putting forth a fully-formed plan to upend global corporate takeover, and I don't think they're required to. All they were pointing out was the falseness of your implication that mirimir themselves (meaning, the people collectively) are somehow responsible for these broken laws. That blame was cast in exactly the wrong direction.
These broken laws are in fact operating as designed. As Warren Buffett observed, "there's class warfare all right, but it's my class — the rich class — that's making war, and we're winning."
Re: Amazon Shareholders Rejected Employees' Call to Respond to Climate Change
#28A call which was made by bcc spamming all the internal amazon mailing lists asking people to sign the petition. Source: I know a guy who got spammed.
Oh. So, some people were annoyed by an effort to help prevent armageddon? And you think this reflects badly on those sending out the annoying emails? Huh. I dont know what to say to you... I'm sorry that global catastrophe and the unsolicited emails that it generates are such an inconvenience to you and your friends?
Nobody likes an evangelist, whether they are right or not. E.g., I’d be more inclined to learn rust if its proponents didn’t have such a Southern Baptist tone.
Re: Amazon Shareholders Rejected Employees' Call to Respond to Climate Change
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, I get it. > But don't expect them to choose to lose money while their competitors burn coal, undercut them and put them out of business because you decided that them doing that should be perfectly legal. The problem is that entrenched corporations more or less own governments, so they get the laws that work for them.
> The problem is that entrenched corporations more or less own governments, so they get the laws that work for them. So what are you proposing to do about it? Notice also that the corporations in this case are the fossil fuel companies, not the data center companies. To Amazon a marginal increase (if that) in energy costs to use solar is just something they get to mark up and pass on to the customer, as long as their…
> What's your proposal?
I don't have one. As you say, they'll do whatever it takes to prevent that. Maybe they'll eventually give up, once climate change has destroyed civilization, but then it'll be moot.
Bottom line, it's hopeless.
Upon reflection, maybe strong AI will emerge before human civilization collapses. Then it'll carry on after humans more or less become extinct. As Spielberg "predicts" in "A.I. Artificial Intelligence".
Re: Amazon Shareholders Rejected Employees' Call to Respond to Climate Change
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon doesn't have a majority shareholder. Most of these huge companies don't. Gates doesn't own a majority of Microsoft, Page and Brin even together don't own a majority of Google, etc. These companies are owned by everybody's retirement fund. It's actually becoming rather a problem because you have these gigantic containers of wealth but there is no one captaining the ship who can do anything bold with it, because…
Your comment is incorrect. There are numerous types of stock. The biggest division being preferred and common. Common entails voting rights, preferred does not. There are also share classes. For instance Google has class A, B, C shares. Class A are what people buy and do entail minimal voting rights. Class B are voting shares owned primarily by the founders and carry 10x the voting rights per share of class A. And cl…
While you're broadly right about the legal authority, keep in mind that the founders can't do most things themselves and at a large corporation, can't even monitor most of what's going on themselves. Getting a large bureaucracy to do something complicated is not as easy as sending out an email. (The most obvious case of this is stopping leaks, which is not as easy as the CEO saying "don't leak stuff".) They can set OKR's but whether they get done or not isn't guaranteed.
Matt Levine occasionally writes about amusing corner cases where corporate governance gets metaphysical [1].
I would guess that Google and Facebook might not have turned out quite like the founders had hoped, though of course they have more power than anyone to turn things around.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-24/compan...