Greenpeace Blasts 'Dirty' Amazon Web Services

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Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder (pictured in 2012) is under fire in a new Greenpeace report.

Image: Reed Saxon/Associated Press

By Chris Taylor2014-04-02 21:07:43 UTC

It may have been a banner day for Amazon on Wednesday with the unveiling of its Fire TV set-top box, but Greenpeace would like to draw your attention to a less visible side of the Jeff Bezos empire.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the largest cloud computing platforms in the world; it lends its vast server farms to Pinterest, Yelp and Flipboard, not to mention hundreds of Silicon Valley startups. According to Greenpeace's report "Clicking Clean" [PDF], released Wednesday, AWS also has one of the largest, dirtiest carbon footprints anywhere in the Internet's infrastructure.

See also: 7 Key Findings From the New UN Climate Science Report

The environmental report praises Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo and Box for the enormous strides they've made in powering their server farms with energy from renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydroelectric power. (Facebook, Apple and Google were on the naughty list just three years ago.) But it doesn't hesitate to call out the bad boys in the class, most notably AWS — and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.

The report's authors blast "Internet companies who have refused to pay even lip service to sustainability, and are simply buying dirty energy straight from the grid. These companies, most notably Amazon Web Services, are choosing how to power their infrastructure based solely on lowest electricity prices, without consideration to the impact their growing footprints have on human health or the environment."

One chart from the report explains what the pressure group means by that:

In a statement to Mashable, Amazon took issue with what it called the report's "false assumptions" and "inaccurate data." The company said that two of its data centers use 100% carbon-free power. "We like offering customers the choice of being able to run carbon-free," a spokesperson said. "Running IT infrastructure on the AWS Cloud is inherently more energy efficient than traditional computing."

But Greenpeace claimed Amazon was being, well, a little cloudy about the whole issue. "We have no interest in getting Amazon's data wrong, which is why we asked them to share their own data," said David Pomerantz, who edited the report. "Unlike other companies, Amazon declined to do that, so we have used the best public sources we can find" from governments and local utilities.

"While Amazon is currently using hydropower in Oregon, which is carbon-free, it is growing so fast there that its utility partner has been trying to avoid meeting a state law that requires it to produce more wind and solar energy," Pomerantz added. "If Amazon were acting responsibly, it would partner with its utility to bring more wind and solar to its energy grid, not less" — just as Apple and Facebook have done in partnership with Duke Energy in North Carolina.

Clearly, Greenpeace is pushing hard on a strategy of effusive praising and righteous shaming in the tech world. Pomerantz concluded that "having one hydro-powered data center out of an otherwise vastly dirty energy footprint, based mostly in Virginia on a coal, gas and nuclear powered grid, is a far cry from the ambitious 100% renewable energy goal that peers like Apple, Facebook and Google are pursuing."

Your move, Amazon.

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Topics: amazon, amazon web services, Climate, greenpeace, jeff bezos, US & World