Butts in Seats
Once the home of the NBA Seattle SuperSonics, the Seattle Center Coliseum that opened in 1962 was most recently renamed the Climate Pledge Arena in 2020 when Amazon bought the naming rights. It is currently the home of the WNBA Seattle Storm. Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge with a non-profit named Global Optimism in 2019. The idea was to create a platform for signatories to work together on ambitious actions to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, 10 years ahead of the 2030 goals noted in the Paris Agreement.
As noted by the The Climate Pledge: “Business does not operate in a vacuum. The Climate Pledge community together is a whole-economy approach, which can influence vast value chains and supply chains to make real business changes feasible more rapidly. Together, we can send demand signals that help deliver the products, policies, goods and services that are needed to tackle the climate crisis.”
Putting its distribution power to work beyond signals, Amazon will ask its supply chain to report emissions starting in 2024. EU regulations like CSRD and CSDDD carry license to operate implications, but the Amazon ask continues to build one of its key assets: data collection.
Image: Seattle SuperSonics playing at KeyArena, now The Climate Pledge Arena
The Climate Pledge Arena has a 18,300 person capacity for WNBA Seattle Storm basketball games. There are an estimated 20,000 people with five or more years of professional experience in product life cycle assessments (LCA) in the world: a number that can almost fit into the Climate Pledge Arena. A limited number of LCA and product-specific sustaiexperts to tackle a large problem has been a consistent opportunity for software technology: pattern matching to optimize decisions with automation and scale.
In the early days of mobile applications, developers needed to understand how to navigate obscure network protocols (e.g. GPRS, SIP) on different device operating systems (e.g. WAP, Palm, Windows CE) using various programming languages (e.g. WML, BREW). There were only an estimated 50,000 application developers around this time who understood how to navigate those three telecom dimensions of applications, networks, and devices. The software platform play is tried and true: provide an abstracted and simplified way for non-experts to utilize the power of the complex underlying assets.
Image: Software platforms enable top while hiding underlying complexity below
The iPhone with its SDK and App Store model enabled millions of mobile applications developers. Twilio provided a REST API to enable millions of web developers. We need an aggregated sustainability impact layer that maps the underlying materials, processes, and suppliers for all products: from 20,000 experts to 20M butts in seats that can make a positive climate impact beyond a pledge.