Tech giant Microsoft is aiming at removing all the carbon dioxide it ever emitted on the planet’s atmosphere by the year 2050. The company is committed and is extensively working towards becoming carbon negative by the year 2030.
As the technology and the processes required to achieve this environment-friendly goal is expensive and not readily commercially available, Microsoft aims at spending $1 billion to fund innovations that aim at reducing capturing as well as removing carbon dioxide from the planet. Microsoft seeks to contribute this over the next four years.
Microsoft has become carbon neutral since the year 2012, canceling out any carbon emissions by purchasing renewable energy products and carbon offsets. The company has also started to charge an internal fee on the business units for their greenhouse gas emissions. This charge is an effort to reduce the emissions by the business units. Additionally, it also plans to start charging businesses and associate partner units for greenhouse gas emissions along its entire supply chain.
Microsoft also plants to its entire electricity use from renewable energy courses by the year 2025. The company is making these efforts to go carbon-free and protect the environment and give the future an eco-friendly and sustainable planet to live.
Of all the efforts, the most competent seems to be the one where it plans to take up carbon from the atmosphere with the company investing in the nascent technology. Propagators of carbon capture are of the view that though the technology is efficient to accomplish Microsoft’s targets, it is highly expensive. The plan of Microsoft’s investing highly into the technology could, however, make the technology cheaper and motivate others to give efforts to go green. Microsoft looks forward to erasing 16 mm tons of carbon dioxide this year. This amount is almost equal to as 15 coal-driven plants. Capturing and erasing carbon dioxide from the air will generally cost $600 every tonne. Viewing this rate, it would cost $9.6 billion to Microsoft only to remove the proposed target of emissions of this year.
Microsoft’s aim to switch over to renewable electricity sources by the year 2025 is fine, but the company will have to make certain adjustments in other areas to accomplish that. The tech giant is holding itself responsible for both it owns emissions as well for the emissions the suppliers are making. For example, in case of Microsoft’s Xbox, Microsoft company is factoring in the atmospheric pollution from materials it used in creating the gaming console, the electricity used for the gaming, emissions from the product shipping as well as from the energy the player consumes. Apart from addressing climate change and erasing emissions, Microsoft will need to create a safe and lasting way to store the carbon emissions it captures.
Microsoft and fossil fuel companies:
Microsoft is also conducting businesses with fossil fuel companies. In September, the company announced the first deal with oil giants Chevron and Schlumberger for “fasten the development of cloud-native solutions and to deliver rapid actionable data insights for the fossil fuel industry” using Azure, the efficient cloud-computing platform of Microsoft. The company also stated that it would launch an innovative “sustainability calculator” that will help Azure users to track as well as report their carbon footprint.
The employees of Microsoft have initiated the company to take massive and more goal-oriented steps to address the global climate crisis. The employees, in a letter, demanded zero contracts with any fossil fuel company, total zero funding for any politician pushing climate denial, and also reaching the target of zero emissions by the year 2030.
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