Microsoft announced its plans to become a ‘Carbon Negative’ company by 2030 meaning that the company plans to remove more planet-heating carbon from the environment than it produces. Adding to its plans Microsoft also announced that the company will remove all of the carbon from the environment it has either emitted directly or produced through electrical use since it the date the company was founded in 1975.
The company has also announced the plans to spend $1 billion over the next four years to pay for the innovation in reducing, capturing, and removing carbon dioxide from the environment.
“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.
The company plans to generate all its electricity from renewables by 2025 and the company will charge all its businesses for producing planet-heating gases along with the supply chain that will help to fund the climate initiatives of the company.
Also Read: 2019 was the second warmest year on Earth in last 140 years
Microsoft is expected to remove 16 million metric tons of carbon this year, and capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can still cost the company $600 per ton. At this rate, it will cost around $9.6 billion for the company to remove this year’s emissions but it is expected that the negative emissions technology will be cheaper in the future.
US Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders is not much of a fan of Carbon capture he says that the carbon capture releases the pressure of the polluters who burn fossil fuels. In 2016, 10 oil and gas companies together decided to feed $1 billion into developing the technologies.
