"There's so many tools and capabilities within Amazon that it can really be a leader in this," says Danilo Quilaton, who has worked at Amazon for over two years as a product designer at Twitch. "That's all I want as an employee of Amazon—to work for a company that's taking climate change seriously and leading the push forward."

The protestors' two other demands were informed, in part, by news reports published over the past several months. In April, Gizmodo reported that Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing division, has aggressively courted the business of oil, gas, and coal companies. In March, Andrew Jassy, the CEO of AWS, even spoke at a fossil fuels conference in Houston, where he stressed Amazon’s close relationship with the industry. The workers who plan to walk out want AWS to no longer sign “custom contracts” to help “fossil fuel companies to accelerate oil and gas extraction,” according to their internal petition.

“I think it’s totally legitimate to say this is a really harmful industry," Fribley says. "It’s accelerating climate change, it pollutes environments and communities in all these different ways, and it’s really dangerous—and we’re not going to do business with it.”

And in July, The New York Times reported that Amazon had paid $15,000 to sponsor an event organized by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank notorious for its attempts to sow public doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change for decades. In a Medium post published in July, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice said they were “heartbroken and angry” about the sponsorship and noted that Amazon had also donated to 68 members of Congress in 2018 who consistently voted against climate change legislation. Now, the workers want Amazon to stop funding groups like CEI, as well as politicians who deny the harmful impacts of a warming planet.

Goal Oriented

Amazon has previously set ambitious environmental goals but has yet to attain them. In 2014—just months after Greenpeace published a damning report on the company's energy usage—Amazon pledged to run 100 percent of AWS on renewable energy sometime in the future. It’s so far only met half of its stated goal. Both Google and Apple already power their operations with 100 percent clean energy, and Facebook says it is not far behind.

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Climate Change

Earlier this year, members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice met with company leadership to discuss the retail giant's plans to combat the climate crisis. Fribley says that, during the meeting, he was surprised to learn that Amazon appeared to have few specific environmental objectives. “I think everybody at Amazon knows that’s not how you get stuff done," he says. "That was kind of eye-opening—to hear that there weren’t goals around reducing the amount of carbon Amazon emits.”

Unlike more than 7,000 corporations around the world, Amazon doesn’t report on its environmental impact to CDP, a UK-based nonprofit formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project. This year, the retail giant said it would finally begin tracking its carbon footprint, but it’s developing its own secretive approach. Corporations that disclose data to CDP do so in a standardized way, whereas Amazon is developing its own methodology.

In an emailed statement, an Amazon spokesperson did not address the walkout directly. "Playing a significant role in helping to reduce the sources of human-induced climate change is an important commitment for Amazon," the statement reads, in part. "We have dedicated sustainability teams who have been working for years on initiatives to reduce our environmental impact."

Amazon has announced several new sustainability initiatives in recent months, including Shipment Zero, a goal to have 50 percent of all deliveries reach net carbon zero by 2030. Shortly after the Gizmodo investigation was published, Amazon also announced it would build three new wind farms, its first renewable energy projects in more than two years.