Microsoft pledges to be ‘carbon negative’ within ten years
9332 Mins Read
Microsoft is making a series of compelling commitments to reduce and ultimately reverse the damage that its business is causing to the environment.
The company is already working to compensate for the carbon dioxide emissions it produces but has decided it needs to go further and move faster if it is to play its part in avoiding catastrophic climate change.
“We’ve spent a lot of time studying the science and the maths,” Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, told ITV News.
“It’s clear that [all companies] are going need to take new steps, we’re going to have to push ourselves, we’re going to have to emit less carbon, we’re going to have to remove carbon from the environment. That is literally the only way to ensure that this planet remains a hospitable place for people”.
To prevent dangerous levels of global warming, the world needs to be removing at least as much carbon from the atmosphere as we put into it by 2050.
Microsoft is pledging to go even further. It’s ambition is to become “carbon negative” by 2030. And by 2050 Microsoft says it will have removed from the environment all of the carbon that the company has emitted since it was founded in 1975.
Technology companies aren’t anywhere near as polluting as oil and gas companies or airlines but Microsoft’s carbon footprint is still huge, principally because it and its customers use so much energy.
Microsoft calculates that it will generate 16 million metric tonnes of carbon this year.
Microsoft has measured the carbon it creates by powering its buildings and its datacentres, by the travel it staff undertake and by the production of its software and its devices.
The company has also estimated and taken responsibility for the carbon generated when its customers use electricity to opens an email on Hotmail, search for something on Bing or stream a video on one its laptops.
