I'm glad to see that there's deliberate movement in this direction. However, it's a little dismaying that the headline is implying that we can address climate change by Consuming More Stuff; that's how we got into this mess in the first place.
This is a big deal because it increases the critical mass towards electrification of transportation, even moreso than the carbon offset by the vans. Right now early adopters are okay with ChargePoint and tolerating some uncertainty with the next charge, but we need 1) more renewable grid input and 2) much more "refueling" infrastructure (public 40 and 80 amp charging).
While I applaud any move towards decreasing negative impacts our our environment, I also encourage people to take advantage of Amazon's option to pick a delivery day and get all your stuff at once.<p>Even without that option, Amazon has some work to do on their route planning - I should never need 3 different deliveries from 3 different drivers on the same day, and that has occurred at my house.
How can you meet Paris commitments early when you are working on helping oil & gas companies extract fossil fuels from the ground even faster?<p><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/oil-and-gas/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/oil-and-gas/</a>
> Bezos said the first electric delivery vans will be on the road by 2021<p>I strongly doubt this will happen. Their truck still isn't in production and they haven't even built a concept van yet. The chances of them producing vans in two years is very low.
>delivery vans from vehicle manufacturer Rivian<p>is Rivian really a vehicle manufacturer? or a startup? I though you have to actually manufacture something to be called manufacturer.
The shareholder proposal may have been defeated, but this is a sign to me that it _worked_ to bring this problem to the forefront of Amazon's agenda. This is a good thing.
Wow talk about win-win. Amazon gets electric vans and Rivian gets ~$10B in expected revenue, which increases the value of Amazon's stake in Rivian.
we can't "electric van" our way out of the climate crisis because it makes too little of a dent over too long of a timescale. bezos' plan is far too weak to even be worth media coverage.<p>mediocre quarter-measure plans like this one will keep us moving at full steam towards catastrophe. if bezos wanted to put a dent in climate change genuinely, he'd take the path of least resistance: subsidize a meaty discount on goods that emit the least CO2 during their production and use as measured by a third party authority. this would create a virtuous economic cycle of manufacturers competing for lower emissions.<p>instead, he's found a way to accomplish little other than self-enrichment while appearing to make an effort. well, bravo. bezos is well on the way to being the richest man on an uninhabitable rock of a planet.
AWS profits something like a million dollars an hour so it's pretty unambitious to need 11 years to make AWS be fully green. $100+ billion in profit will accrue from AWS in that time. It doesn't take 11 years to claw back 1900 workers' health care.
Yet another plan. Great. When will we finally start seeing media reports on actual emission reductions? In 2020 I want to read "Amazon has reduced its total emissions by 5% compared to 2019".
For cities it would make sense to deliver packages to neighborhood hubs in vans and from there deliver them using cargo bikes to the recipients. That would probably safe more energy, but cost a bit more as a bicycle worker can transport fewer packages per day.
Where I live UPS trucks have been plug-in hybrid for years now. They are powered entirely by battery when driving slowly through neighborhoods. So I'm not sure how much difference this would _really_ make.
as expected, sections of the bourgeoisie are trying to barely solve CO2 pollution while continuing to maximize every other kind of resource consumption and concomitant non-CO2 pollution. or at least, pretend that they are trying to solve it. either way they will run into the concerted resistance of the bourgeoisie who depend on CO2 pollution as a business model, and who are extremely powerful.<p>the alternative to this shitshow is to democratically plan resource investment, and get away from the insanity of a road-and-small-vehicle-based city system (aka, establish socialism). I'm optimistic we'll get there after the youth watch rich people vacillate over climate change for a few more years :)