You Don't Say!! US Corporations Abandoning Climate/Recycling Goals Across The Board - Coke, Google, Amazon, Wal-Mart

[hatrack]

Not so long ago, many of America’s biggest companies were making bold promises about saving the planet. They pledged to stop polluting, get off fossil fuels and use recyclable materials. Some even promised to reinvent their core business practices, speaking aspirationally about a new, more sustainable economy. These goals were set, and trumpeted, by the companies making the phone in your pocket, the shoes on your feet and the food in your fridge — and others. Coca-Cola, a company that produces as much plastic trash as any in the world, even began talking about “a world without waste.”

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Many companies have simply acknowledged they’ve missed the targets they had set for themselves. In 2020, Walmart said it would slash its greenhouse gas emissions by more than a third within five years and by almost two-thirds within ten years, from a 2015 base line. But in December 2024, the company acknowledged it would miss the first target. The company’s emissions had actually risen the year before, and Walmart said that achieving its goals would “require innovation and technology that is not available or economically viable, or fully scalable today.”Walmart also said it would miss its recycling goals.

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JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, in 2021 said it would eliminate or offset all of its emissions within 20 years, saying that “anything less is not an option.” But last year, after Attorney General Letitia James of New York sued the company, accusing it of making misleading statements about its climate goals, JBS had a new message. It described its emissions targets as an “aspiration.” And, in an interview with Reuters, the company’s chief sustainability officer, Jason Weller, said, “It was never a promise that JBS was going to make this happen.” JBS, which settled the lawsuit last year, is now targeting a 70 percent reduction of emissions by 2050.

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Coca-Cola, the world’s biggest soda maker, once aimed to reduce emissions by a quarter by 2030, using a 2015 base line. But in December 2024, the company reset the clock. It is now using 2019 as a base line to measure its progress, and is no longer aiming for a specific percentage. The new target is based on calculations about what the world needs to do to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the catastrophic effects of global warming would be unavoidable. The planet has already warmed 1.4 degrees.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/climate/company-climate-change-commitments-renege.html

[Scrivener7]

1. So we need to abandon them.

[hatrack]

2. It's the only thing they'll even notice (maybe).

.

[Scrivener7]

3. I kind of despair though. There's always a contingent that insists they can't live

without them, and we don't seem to have the will to stand up to them.