Microsoft has just announced the company has a plan to go carbon negative by 2030, taking things a step farther than being carbon neutral. They also claim that by 2050 they “remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975.”
Microsoft’s new announcement to go carbon negative has people pleasantly surprised including the Director of Private Sector Climate Mitigation, Cynthia Cummins, who says:
I’ve never seen that before. They’re going to decarbonize at a very fast rate and then [use] carbon removals to balance out those remaining emissions. That’s what’s in line with science and what we want to see all companies doing.
Microsoft said that the company has been “carbon neutral” for years actively reducing emissions and paying for offsets.
Microsoft president Brad Smith wrote: “Neutral is not enough to address the world’s needs.” One way to be more proactive is by planting trees and that’s great, but it’s large companies like Microsoft that can have a greater impact by investing in carbon capture and other innovative technologies to clean our air.
Columbia University professor David Golberg talks about direct air capture:
It’s not a new technology, Small-scale installations are active now. But “scaling that technology up to where it could be very, very effective and viable for a large-scale capture and storage… that’s earlier in the development phase.
Microsoft plans on creating a $1 billion fund for investing in such technologies.
“There are a lot of emissions up in the atmosphere already, unfortunately,” says Paula DiPerna, an expert on climate change mitigation. “I think the emphasis on removal is welcome.”
This is certainly a strong pledge from the company, but one can’t help but wonder if they will also stop doing business with the fossil fuel companies. That seems doubtful, in September of 2019 they signed a major deal with big oil companies Schlumberger and Chevron. The deal uses Microsoft’s cloud-based platform Azure to “accelerate the development of cloud-native solutions and deliver actionable data insights for the industry.”
Microsoft’s latest carbon-negative announcement includes a new “sustainability calculator” that is designed to help Azure customers report and track their carbon footprint.
Despite recent pressure from Microsoft employees to stop working with fossil fuel companies, Microsoft is not backing down from their partnerships. Instead, they argue that oil and gas companies need to “meet today’s business demands.” Company employees were calling for zero contracts with fossil fuel companies, zero funding for politicians who push climate denial, and zero emissions by 2030.
Big business has ignored global warming for a long time. This is certainly a step in the right direction, even if the company continues its relationships with big oil and fossil fuel companies. At least they are taking some of the billions of dollars they have and are trying to do some form of good with it. It’s possible that the pressure they felt from their employees along with a greater awareness around the world has played a part in getting the computer giant to take some accountability and action.
Climate change activist group Extinction Rebellion UK called the announcement; “an important step in the right direction, then asked; “who will follow next?”
