As many as 2,000 of them hit the streets Friday, joining students and other activists in climate strikes in places like Dublin; Cape Town, South Africa; and Bucharest, Romania.
Katrina eventually spurred Walmart Inc. — the largest global retailer — to begin measuring, publishing and reducing its global warming emissions starting in 2008. Eventually, some 5,000 other businesses followed suit, including 150 companies that, like Walmart, began pushing their suppliers to cut their emissions (Climatewire, May 14).
“We have to take responsibility for the impact that our business has on the planet and on people,” the group said in a statement.
“We’re done being in the middle of the herd on this issue — we’ve decided to use our size and scale to make a difference,” Bezos announced at the National Press Club.
He said he was starting a “climate pledge” movement to measure and support “net-zero annual carbon emissions by 2040” and predicted that other CEOs would join.
Bruno Sarda, the president of a group called CDP North America, formerly called the Climate Disclosure Project, said Bezos’ pledge was unnecessary because the group, with help from Walmart and others, had already established a process for companies to measure, publish and reduce their carbon emissions.
Travis Burk, a spokesman for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said his group’s usually loquacious director of global warming and international environmental policy, Myron Ebell, was not available to comment on Bezos’ new stance. “Thanks for reaching out, but we are going to pass on commenting on this one,” he said in an email.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.
