Amazon’s chief sustainability officer said something on Tuesday that companies of its size almost never say out loud: the company doesn’t actually know how it’s going to achieve the net-zero carbon emissions target it set for itself. “We are still striving towards that target,” Kara Hurst said at an Axios event, before adding, “I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘We know all the ways that we’re going to do this.'”

It’s a rare moment of corporate candour. It’s also, as TechCrunch’s Tim De Chant put it in his report on the admission, “a bit disappointing” — because if one of the world’s largest and most resourced companies doesn’t have a clear roadmap to net zero, the obvious question is who does.

First, what “net zero” actually means

Net zero isn’t the same as simply cutting emissions, and it isn’t the same as “carbon neutral” either, even though the terms get used loosely. Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s definition, net zero is a balancing act: the amount of greenhouse gases a company or country releases into the atmosphere must be matched by an equivalent amount removed from it — whether through natural carbon sinks like forests, or through technology-based carbon removal. Crucially, net zero covers all greenhouse gases, not just carbon dioxide — methane, nitrous oxide and various hydrofluorocarbons all count.

For corporations specifically, the most widely used framework comes from the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), whose Corporate Net-Zero Standard requires companies to cut at least 90% of their emissions through real reductions, with only the remaining 10% or less addressed through permanent carbon removal — not offsets that merely avoid emissions elsewhere. Emissions are typically tracked across three categories: Scope 1 (a company’s direct emissions), Scope 2 (emissions from the energy it purchases), and Scope 3 (everything else — its suppliers, its shipping partners, and even how customers use its products). Scope 3 is, almost universally, where corporate net-zero plans fall apart, because it requires a company to influence emissions it doesn’t directly control.

The global backdrop matters too: the Paris Agreement aims to keep global warming well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and ideally within 1.5°C — the threshold scientists have identified as the line beyond which climate impacts become significantly more severe and harder to reverse.

Amazon’s specific commitment — and its scale

Amazon didn’t just adopt a generic net-zero goal; it created the mechanism many other companies now use to make the same one. In 2019, Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge alongside the organization Global Optimism, committing signatories to reach net-zero carbon by 2040 — a full decade ahead of the Paris Agreement’s global 2050 target. That pledge has grown substantially: as of The Climate Pledge’s 2026 report, more than 700 companies across 49 countries and 62 industries have signed on, with combined annual revenues of $3.8 trillion, and 107 new companies joined in 2025 alone.

Amazon’s own scale makes its target unusually consequential. The company’s revenue climbed 12% last year to $717 billion — roughly the size of Ireland’s entire national economy, as De Chant’s report notes. Hurst pointed out that Amazon has been “one of the largest purchasers of clean energy in the world for the last several years running,” with 42 gigawatts of clean energy in its portfolio. The company also says it has reduced its carbon intensity — how much pollution it generates per dollar of revenue — though that claim depends heavily on which years you compare: according to Amazon’s own 2025 sustainability report, carbon intensity actually rose in the most recent year compared with 2024, even though it remained below 2022 levels.

The contradiction that undercuts the pledge

Here’s where Amazon’s climate story gets more complicated. Earlier this year, an investigation revealed the company’s plans to build a 7.65 gigawatt natural gas power plant to supply an AI data center campus. According to that reporting, the plant’s 35 turbines could release up to 33 million tons of carbon dioxide annually — which would make it, on its own, the single largest source of that pollution anywhere in the United States.

That’s a striking contradiction for a company that co-created the corporate net-zero movement: pursuing one of the largest natural-gas-fired power projects in the country at the same time it says it’s still “striving towards” eliminating its emissions entirely. As Hurst told TechCrunch in a written response, “This isn’t a question of companies versus governments. Tackling climate change at the scale it demands takes both, and it takes them working together… Where we can lead, we do.” But the gas plant is a clear example of AI-driven revenue growth taking precedence over the company’s own stated climate leadership — a tension the TechCrunch report describes bluntly: “AI is apparently a revenue driver that’s impossible to pass up.”

Amazon isn’t alone — and that’s the bigger warning sign

Amazon’s struggle fits into a much broader pattern of corporate net-zero pledges quietly unraveling. In a 2024 review, the Science Based Targets initiative changed the status of 239 companies — out of 590 that had made net-zero commitments — to “commitment removed,” because they failed to submit verifiable, science-based plans within the required 24-month window. The list of downgraded companies included some of the world’s most recognizable brands: Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Walmart among them, representing more than $4 trillion in combined market capitalization. Amazon itself had already had its own SBTi commitment status removed the previous year, following a methodology dispute. Across the board, companies cited the same core obstacle: Scope 3 emissions, the indirect emissions running through supply chains and customer use, proved far harder to eliminate than direct operational emissions.

Other companies illustrate what a serious net-zero-by-2040 commitment can look like when it’s paired with concrete, verifiable steps. Danish shipping giant A.P. Møller–Maersk set a net-zero-by-2040 target aligned with SBTi’s 1.5°C pathway — a decade earlier than its original 2050 goal — backed by specific interim 2030 targets: a 50% reduction in emissions per container transported by its ocean fleet, and a 70% reduction in absolute emissions from its fully controlled terminals. Danish energy company Ørsted has set the same 2040 net-zero deadline, tied to the same SBTi standard. Both remain formally part of the same broader movement Amazon helped launch — proof that a 2040 target isn’t inherently unrealistic, even as Amazon’s own path to it remains, by its own sustainability chief’s admission, undefined.

Why this counts as a setback for the 1.5°C goal

The stakes here go well beyond one company’s internal roadmap. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres has pointed out, economic power has increasingly shifted from governments to a small number of dominant corporations — and Amazon, with revenue comparable to a mid-sized national economy, sits near the top of that list. When a company of that scale — one that literally built the coalition structure hundreds of other companies now use to frame their own climate commitments — says it doesn’t have a plan to reach net zero, it weakens confidence in the broader corporate net-zero movement precisely at a moment when global emissions need to be falling fast enough to keep warming within 1.5°C.

The math is unforgiving regardless of any single company’s intentions: every gigawatt of new natural gas capacity built today to power AI expansion adds decades of emissions to the atmosphere, working directly against the removals and reductions net-zero pledges promise. If the company with arguably the most resources, the most climate expertise on staff, and the most influence over other corporations’ own pledges can’t yet chart a credible path to its own target, it raises a hard question for the hundreds of smaller, less-resourced companies that followed Amazon’s lead into the same 2040 commitment — and for the climate math the whole Paris Agreement framework depends on.