Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, announced his intention to see the company become “carbon neutral by 2040,” and pledged to buy up to 100,000 electric delivery vans, Reuters reports.
The announcement comes ahead of an event known as “Climate Week” in New York, a weekly gathering of worldwide political and business figures, as well as protests, seeking to combat alleged “global warming.”
The U.S.-based non-profit group Ceres, which deals with such pledges by private companies to work towards such environmental standards, said in a statement that Amazon was the first major company to make such a pledge. Ceres spokeswoman Sue Reid said that Amazon’s announcement was “groundbreaking and potentially game-changing,” and that it “will certainly have ripple effects because Amazon is so intertwined with the entire economy.”
Bezos claimed that this pledge would see Amazon fulfill the requirements of the Paris Climate Accord “10 years ahead of the accord’s schedule,” in an apparent jab at President Donald Trump. The Trump Administration withdrew the United States from the Paris Accord in 2017, as the Obama-era deal was projected to cost the United States trillions of dollars and was widely unpopular with the American public.