Microsoft aims for negative emissions starting in 2030
Human caused climate change has serious ramifications for the future of civilization. Problems such as sea level rise, increased desertification, reductions in food production, extreme weather events, and other serious concerns appear to be more and more likely as the climate increasingly warms. Microsoft is recognizing the role it has creating problematic emissions and is looking to reduce its negative impact on the environment.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it intends to be carbon negative by 2030. This is intended to include direct emissions, as well as their "supply and value chain", meaning it will be including the carbon emissions of the products it contracts out when making emissions calculations. It also hopes to remove all of the carbon it has emitted since 1975, completely removing its equivalent carbon by 2050. It is also committed to investing $1 billion in the research and development of new carbon reduction, capture and removal technologies, and customer climate-change awareness programs. "Carbon capture" technology removes already released carbon and either sequesters it or uses it in some other application to prevent it from impacting the climate.
Microsoft also intends to switch over to entirely to renewable energy by 2025 and plans to use "green energy" for "100 percent of carbon emitting electricity consumed by all our data centers, buildings, and campuses". Microsoft plans on achieving this using a number of technological and natural carbon capturing strategies, "potentially including afforestation and reforestation, soil carbon sequestration, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCs), and direct air capture (DAC)." Microsoft has also stated its intention to electrify its operations vehicle fleet.
One high priority for the company is encouraging its suppliers to do their part to curb emissions. Microsoft's goal is to work with collaborators to set "targets" with respect to climate change, as well as to strongly encourage transparency, and the scientific process of gradually reducing carbon emissions. In short, big change is coming to Microsoft.
The company plans on investing $1 billion over four years in yet to be invented carbon removal technology. This movement is intended to be global. They also signed "the United Nations' 1.5-degree Business Ambition Pledge" and said it will now be releasing a publicly available annual "Environmental Sustainability Report". It has also launched a new app, the "Microsoft Sustainability Calculator", which aims at educating customers about their cloud emissions, but also purportedly will show consumers that they should migrate fully to Microsoft's cloud service, Azure. Microsoft claims these policy changes are for the benefit of the environment, but what other benefits Microsoft hopes to accrue, such as advertising, remains to be seen
Microsoft has said that it correlates high energy use with economic growth, and that, if we want to see global development, that will continue to involve high energy use, and that this is vital for developing nations to have access to the energy that helped develop the "more industrialized nations". In other words, this is a time when developed nations and wealthy conglomerates really need to do all they can to create feasible green alternatives for energy production, so that those who are less prosperous don't have to miss out. Production of electricity is a major contributor to climate change, making clean energy more important than ever. The demand for energy is growing world-wide, but so is the need to curb the changes in the environment.
Microsoft isn't alone in recognizing its pollution problems, as other companies, such as Apple, have stated policies and goals. Apple is moving towards using 100% recycled inputs for its products, as well as 100% renewable energy. Google, however, has recently come under fire for supporting what some have called "climate change denying" organizations. It's good to see Microsoft moving in the direction of carbon negativity but given that it's one of the richest organizations on earth it's really what one would expect a massively wealthy company to do in 2020, as the company itself admitted. Climate change is a widely accepted threat and leaving the solution up to individual altruism is likely not sufficient to solve the problem. On the other hand, until we find a long-term global political solution, individual altruism is largely all we've got.
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