“Those predictions were bad but what is actually happening is dire,” he said.

Thursday’s announcement comes a day before more that 1,500 Amazon employees had planned to walk out of work, in an escalation of almost a year of pressuring Amazon to be more aggressive in its climate goals. The walkout is in conjunction with a day of planned climate strikes around the world.

They pushed Amazon on three issues: That the company have zero emissions by 2030, that it stop offering custom cloud-computing services that help the oil and gas industry find and extract more fossil fuels, and that it stop giving campaign donations to politicians who deny climate change is happening.

Mr. Bezos punted on many of their demands. Amazon would still continue to sell its cloud services to the oil and gas industry, he said. “We’re going to work hard for energy companies, and in our view we’re going to work very hard to make sure that as they transition that they have the best tools possible,” he said. “To ask oil and energy companies to do this transition with bad tools is not a good idea and we won’t do that.”

He said the company was taking a “hard look” at whether its political donations were going to “active climate deniers,” but stopped short of saying that the company would not give them more money in the future.

Mr. Bezos said Thursday that Amazon would lobby on a case-by-case basis for political responses to climate change. But he declined to endorse the Green New Deal, which has gained significant traction on the left.