As Amazon Sees Record Profits, Customers Say 'Start Delivering Climate Action'

Friday, the day after Amazon revealed record 2025 profits, 10 members of Prime Members for a Cleaner Amazon staged a pedicab protest in front of its Seattle headquarters, calling on the company to raise its climate ambition to the level of its earnings.

In its fourth quarter report, released Thursday, the tech giant announced that its 2025 income had soared to $77.7 billion, up from $59.2 billion in 2024.

“Amazon has an extraordinary opportunity and an obligation to act more swiftly on climate change,” participant Michael Lazarus told Common Dreams. “It’s a leading provider of consumer goods to consumers who want climate action. It has made broad pledges to take action on climate change, it has made some small steps, but it needs to deliver on immediate action.”

Concerned customers are demanding the company put some of those profits toward speeding up the electrification of its delivery fleet, powering its data centers with renewable energy, and improving working conditions for its employees while respecting their collective bargaining rights. A Morning Consult poll found that 80% of Prime members surveyed wanted the company to reduce its transport and delivery emissions, and 75% would accept slower delivery times in exchange for less climate pollution.

“Profits are up. So is pollution. Prime members say: Deliver more climate action.”

“Amazon’s success is built on us, its customers. Now, we’re asking the company to stop celebrating profits and start delivering climate action,” said Dr. Chris Covert-Bowlds, a Seattle-based member of Prime Members for a Cleaner Amazon and Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility.

The protest took place outside Amazon’s Day 1 building, where CEO Andy Jassy has his office, from around 8:00 am to 10:30 am Pacific time. Participants rode four pedicabs as a subtle suggestion to the company of how to move goods without fossil fuels. The cabs were decorated with billboards with messages such as, “Deliver packages. Not pollution,” and “Profits are up. So is pollution. Prime members say: Deliver more climate action.”

Participants also handed out hundreds of stickers and flyers to Seattle residents and Amazon employees.

Amazon has a history of making sustainability promises it does not keep and retaliating against employees who call it to account. While it has pledged to reach carbon neutrality across its operations by 2040, it is increasingly unclear how it will achieve this given its buildout of energy-intensive data centers and artificial intelligence.

“We’ve been calling attention to Amazon’s failure to align its emissions reductions with the latest climate science for years,” Stand.earth campaigner Joshua Archer told Common Dreams.

However, he said what “makes this moment really unique” is that Amazon is now failing three distinct groups of people: consumers like those at the protest who want it to do better on climate, investors who are concerned about returns from the AI buildout, and the 30,000 employees it laid off since October despite its record profits.

“The company is not respecting the employees on whose backs the company has built its success” just as it’s “not respecting the latest climate science,” Archer said.

Lazarus said that many employees expressed interest in the protesters’ demands. While some zipped past in headphones, others “lit up and were clearly engaged and simpatico.”

He noted that Amazon employees have been organizing for years to pressure the company to increase its climate ambitions through Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and hoped the addition of consumer advocacy would help “Amazon realize that there’s a groundswell of support for taking more aggressive measures to reduce their climate impact... which is becoming quite monumental given the growth in data cents and the influence that they carry.”

Lazarus told Common Dreams it was also important to him that Amazon ramp up its climate ambitions given President Donald Trump’s determination to double down on fossil fuels and inhibit renewable energy.

“We know that we’re not going to see much climate action at the federal level,” he said. “It becomes all the more important for corporate actors like Amazon to demonstrate that it remains committed to and acts upon its need to reduce emissions.”