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As a result, to achieve 100 percent clean energy — at least on paper — companies often buy what are known as renewable energy certificates, or RECs, from a solar or wind farm owner. By buying enough credits to match or exceed the energy its operations use, a company could make the claim that its business is powered entirely by clean energy.
“That’s what we do, buy RECs for projects that are not yet operational,” Ms. Hurst said.
In a report published by the Amazon employee group after the company’s announcement, the workers said their research concluded that after deducting Amazon’s use of credits, the real investment in clean energy was just a fraction of what was publicized.
“Buying a bunch of RECs doesn’t help anything,” Ms. Stokes said. “You just have to be investing in real projects.”
Kind of the main punchline of the article. It’s indulgences again
The reasoning was that in the old style of filibuster no other senate business was possible. In theory was supposed to help the senate be more productive. In practice, it’s made the filibuster even more powerful. If a party was holding up all legislation and other functions of the senate by grandstanding for something stupid, that could hurt them politically, especially if it got bad enough that the military was being impacted or there were government shutdowns. So maybe they would think twice if it was worth a filibuster. Now they can kind of do it risk free. I think if you saw, government shutdown caused by Republicans trying to prevent abortion protections, well it’d be pretty unpopular with most Americans. And they’d pay for it in the polls. Or maybe not even do the filibuster in the first place.