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This remains a five-alarm fire. We have just days left in our Fall Campaign and the numbers we’re seeing are not good. This is terrifying for us, especially when everything we cherish is on the ballot just one week from now.
"These jets are a stark symbol of social and climate injustice, where a privileged few indulge in the most environmentally damaging form of travel for mere convenience," said one Greenpeace campaigner.
Green groups' anger percolated this week after it was revealed that Brian Niccol, Starbucks' new CEO, will "supercommute" approximately 1,000 miles between one of his homes in California and the coffee giant's Seattle headquarters three times a week.
A Starbucks spokesperson said earlier this week that "while Brian will have an office in Southern California, his primary office and a majority of his time will be spent in our Seattle Support Center."
"When he is not traveling for work, he will be in our Seattle office at least three days a week, in alignment with our hybrid work policies," the spokesperson added. "He will also have a home in Seattle."
"A private jet flight causes about 10 times more CO2 emissions than a regular flight per flight per person."
Greenpeace—which for years has been running a campaign to ban private jets and regularly stages protests against them at airports around the world—led condemnation of Niccol's harmful commute.
"As the world faces unprecedented heatwaves, droughts, floods, and other dire consequences of an accelerating climate crisis, it is unjustifiable for companies to offer company aircraft as employee perks," Greenpeace campaigner Clara Thompson toldThe Washington Post on Thursday.
"These jets are a stark symbol of social and climate injustice, where a privileged few indulge in the most environmentally damaging form of travel for mere convenience," Thompson added.
As Greenpeace notes:
A private jet flight causes about 10 times more CO2 emissions than a regular flight per flight per person, and 50 times more than the average train ride. Eighty percent of the world's population have never flown, yet they're the ones most impacted by the climate crisis. In just one hour, a single private jet can emit two tons of CO2. The global average energy-related carbon footprint is around 4.7 tons of CO2 per person per year.
While private jets account for a tiny fraction of global greenhouse emissions, the world's richest 1% produce more than double the emissions of the poorest 50%, and a single billionaire produces a million times more emissions than an average person, according to a 2022 Oxfam study.
Some critics accused Starbucks—which in 2020 set a goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% this decade—of hypocrisy, with one social media user contrasting Niccol's private jet commute with the company's introduction of widely despised and environmentally dubious paper straws. Another eagle-eyed observer spotted a book titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster on display in Niccol's office in a Wall Street Journal article photo.
"I'm sure that private jet will use sustainable aviation fuel," climate scientist David Ho quipped on social media.
Why Seattle’s City Council should reject calls to repeal or weaken PAY UP! policies protecting app-based workers.
A mere two months after a series of new protections for certain app-based workers in Seattle took effect, corporations like DoorDash and Uber Eats that had opposed them are trying to destroy them another way: by charging new service fees in order to tank consumer demand and available work.
In doing so, these companies manipulate more than just the market. They orchestrate a political backlash in which they seek consumers and workers to join them in denouncing the law as the culprit and clamoring for its repeal. It’s a tactic from a well-worn playbook.
As Seattle’s City Council recently recognized in passing the minimum pay law, these corporations “often pay app-based workers subminimum wages despite the promise of good wages, flexibility, and accessibility.” Moreover, these digital labor platforms rely disproportionately on Black and Latinx workers to provide the services they offer. Again, the City Council astutely recognized that such workers “face unique barriers to economic security and disproportionately must accept low-wage, unsafe, and insecure working conditions.” Black and Latinx workers are “disproportionately deprived of core employee protections” because the corporations treat them as independent contractors.
The new policies did not require DoorDash, Uber Eats, or any other company to increase service fees instead of ensuring that their workers benefit.
The Seattle City Council wisely sought to tackle and reverse these unfair and inequitable conditions. It declared that: “the City intends to address the inequities of app-based work by ensuring that such workers earn at least the city’s minimum wage plus reasonable expenses, receive transparent information on job offers and pay, and exercise the flexibility promised by network companies.”
Policy changes take time to have impact. Yet the City Council is already facing pressure from these corporations to reverse policies that they committed to just recently.
That’s because these corporations have launched one of their favorite strategies: use their control of the apps to bamboozle consumers, workers, and even elected officials into thinking that workplace protections are too costly and unworkable. In New York City, for example, after a new pay standard for app-based delivery workers took effect, “the companies wasted no time in restricting workers’ access to their platforms and discouraging tips.” Such tactics are designed to undermine support for the new protections.
App-based delivery companies are imitating the corporate tactics Uber and Lyft have used against ridehail drivers. Although Seattle’s city laws can’t touch ridehail driver conditions after the corporations pushed through a problematic preemption policy, recent analysis of that industry shows the need to drill down on the true causes and impacts of price increases. Uber and Lyft raised fares substantially more in Chicago—a city without a pay standard for app-based drivers—than in New York City, which enacted a relatively robust pay standard. If corporate claims that pay increases necessarily make rides prohibitively expensive were true, New York’s riders would have seen the more drastic increases.
Given these predictable tactics, perhaps it is no surprise that Seattle’s app-based workers are still struggling, at the mercy of corporate greed and gamesmanship. They log on and make themselves available for work, only to find there is suddenly little work to be had. It’s easy to see why many would blame the new laws, but the new policies did not require DoorDash, Uber Eats, or any other company to increase service fees instead of ensuring that their workers benefit.
The likely culprit isn’t the new protections, and the City Council should not be fooled. Rather than caving to corporate demands that reduce pay for disproportionately Black and immigrant workers who can least afford it, the council should demand data from the corporations to conduct rigorous, neutral research on its true impacts. For their part, the corporations that insist that new protections are the problem should be eager to turn over the data that will prove their case. But their one-sided and self-interested claims about what their own corporate-backed research shows should be rejected. And without evidence, the council should not fall victim to this play.
All eyes are on Seattle. Elected officials must be clear eyed about what is happening and demand answers. Corporate-sponsored policies that give the companies even more control will only undermine and exacerbate the race and income inequalities that the council sought to address. Rather, councilmembers should look to the Minneapolis example, and reject corporate efforts to scapegoat policies at the expense of the populations those policies were designed to protect and benefit. Stay the course.
"Amazon is breaking its Climate Pledge by powering new data centers with fracked gas," said one member of the new activist group. "So we came to demand that they honor the pledge."
A recently formed group of climate activists on Wednesday shut down entrances to Amazon's downtown Seattle headquarters to protest the tech titan's plans to link some of its data centers with an upgraded fracked gas pipeline.
Members of the Troublemakers—who describe themselves as "an ever-growing community of people who are committed to taking action for life on Earth"—blockaded the doors to the Day 1 Building on 7th Ave. in opposition to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) plan to connect three data centers near Boardman, Oregon to TC Energy's Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) XPress Project.
As Common Dreamsreported last October, GTN XPress, which has been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, would upgrade compressor stations in Kootenai County, Idaho; Sherman County, Oregon; and Walla Walla County, Washington. TC Energy plans to boost the 60-year-old pipeline's capacity by 150 million cubic feet of fracked gas by increasing the conduit's pressure.
"The decision to use fracked gas from the GTN XPress adds to Amazon's carbon emissions problems," the Troublemakers said in a statement. "Amazon's 2022 carbon emissions totaled 71.27 million metric tons, marking an 18% rise from 2020 and a 40% surge since 2019, the year Amazon unveiled its Climate Pledge. This alarming trend is in stark contrast to the global imperative to halve emissions by 2030."
The group wrote in a March 19 letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy:
Amazon prides itself on innovation. Using fossil fuel is not innovation... It is relying on a dying technology that is killing the planet. Utilizing GTN XPress would increase Amazon's carbon footprint and contribute greatly to climate change... We urge you to publicly commit to financing solar or wind projects to provide clean energy for Amazon's operations, and reject the GTN XPress.
The Troublemakers are calling on Amazon to:
"We see Amazon's greenwashing every time we pass by Climate Pledge Arena," said Troublemaker Valerie Costa, who was referring to the home of the Seattle Kraken and Seattle Storm professional sports franchises. "Until Amazon drops its plan to buy fracked gas from GTN XPress, we'll keep showing up. Every fossil fuel project in the [Pacific Northwest] will be met with fierce resistance."
Leonard Sklar, a scientist and Troublemaker, asserted that "Amazon is breaking its Climate Pledge by powering new data centers with fracked gas. So we came to demand that they honor the pledge."
"We know they have the power to be 100% renewable energy," he added, "and that's what this moment requires."