Microsoft commits to carbon negativity

Microsoft President Brad Smith, Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood and CEO Satya Nadella. © Brian Smale, Microsoft.

Microsoft has been carbon neutral since 2012, canceling out its emissions by purchasing renewable energy and carbon offsets. 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. It has even said that by 2050 it will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975. Finally, the company is also launching an initiative to use Microsoft technology to help its suppliers and customers around the world reduce their own carbon footprints and a new $1 billion climate innovation fund to accelerate the global development of carbon reduction, capture, and removal technologies. To support all this, Microsoft will publish an annual Environmental Sustainability Report that provides transparency on its progress, based on strong global reporting standards. It will also launch a new tool, the Microsoft Sustainability Calculator that analyzes the estimated emissions from Azure services through a Power BI dashboard.

⇨ YouTube, “Explainer: Understanding the Math Behind Microsoft’s Commitment to Become Carbon Negative by 2030.”

⇨ The Verge, Justine Calma, “Microsoft wants to capture all of the carbon dioxide it’s ever emitted.”

⇨ Official Microsoft Blog, Brad Smith, “Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030.”