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Today is Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting. Nearly 7,700 Amazon employees signed their name publicly asking Bezos and the board to adopt our climate change resolution. Employees want to LEAD on the climate crisis.
A thread on our historic, collective action 👇 https://t.co/9hdFAJTmGL
— Emily Cunningham (@emahlee) May 22, 2019
After nearly 8,000 Amazon employees signed a letter asking CEO Jeff Bezos to enact a comprehensive company-wide climate plan, they were hoping to make their case and speak to their boss at the company’s annual shareholder’s meeting. Instead, they were blown off. As Business Week explained,
“Amazon employee Emily Cunningham, one of the organizers of the climate proposal, stood up to introduce it to the other shareholders at the meeting. Her voice shook as she started to speak, she said. And her first question was, where’s our boss, Jeff Bezos? She asked him to come out on stage so she could “speak to him directly.” The event moderator shrugged her off, saying that Bezos would be out later. When asked if Bezos would be able to hear the employees’ proposal, an awkward silence hung over the proceedings until the MC curtly responded: “I assume so.“”
Why This Matters: Even though shareholders ended up voting down the climate proposal, this is a big shift for tech workers who been historically hesitant to speak out, are becoming more willing to serve as corporate activists and weigh in on the moral and ethical decisions of the firms that employ them, as Vox explained. Amazon has been criticized recently for its courting of fossil fuel companies for business and its employees are stepping up pressure on their employer to act as a responsible corporate citizen. While they didn’t succeed today, they’re continuing to organize through a new Twitter account and aren’t planning on giving up any time soon.
A new study shows that climate change in the 150 years since the industrial revolution has canceled out the prior 6500 years of cooling. The study, conducted by researchers at Northern Arizona University’s School of Earth and Sustainability (SES), examined a new compilation of paleoclimate data along with new statistical analyses and found that millennial-scale […]
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There’s been ample research to show that the Arctic is warming much faster than any other region on the planet. However, there’s been little media focus on what’s happening on the opposite side of the planet, until now. A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Monday has revealed that the South […]
Continue Reading 292 wordsA coalition of nearly 300 progressive groups that span the environmental and civil rights movements have been working together for a year to hammer out the pillars of a climate justice plan they want to see passed, and the House Climate Crisis Committee adopted much of it in the comprehensive Solving the Climate Crisis Action Plan released on Tuesday.
Why This Matters: When they work together in a coalition, these groups have real political muscle.
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