Microsoft wants to capture all of the carbon dioxide it’s ever emitted
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21068799/microsoft-carbon-capture-climate-change
Reported today in The Verge.
Microsoft wants to capture all of the carbon dioxide it's ever emitted
Microsoft plans to remove all of the carbon dioxide it has ever released into the atmosphere by 2050, it announced today. The company committed to becoming carbon negative by 2030, meaning that it plans to draw down more planet-heating carbon dioxide than it emits.
The technology needed to make that goal a reality is still expensive and not widely commercially available, so the company also plans to spend $1 billion over the next four years to fund innovation in reducing, capturing, and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The company has been carbon neutral since 2012, canceling out its emissions by purchasing renewable energy and carbon offsets. That's also when it started charging an internal fee on its business units for the greenhouse gases they generate as a way to get its divisions to slash their emissions. Those measures are no longer ambitious enough for the company, according to Microsoft president Brad Smith. It now plans to source all of its electricity use from renewables by 2025. And it will start charging its businesses for the planet-heating gases they generate along the entire supply chain to help fund its new climate initiatives.
"It reminds me of the Microsoft of old. They used to do big, audacious stuff like this all the time and I'm glad to see that ethos return on a planetary basis. It's also long overdue," Julio Friedmann, a senior research scholar at Columbia University who previously led the Department of Energy's R&D on carbon capture and storage, tells The Verge.
The most audacious commitment from Microsoft is its push to take carbon out of the atmosphere. The company is putting its faith in nascent technology, and it's injecting a sig