Microsoft has announced ambitious new plans to reduce its impact on the environment. The IT giant is poised to go further than most others by pledging to become "carbon negative" by 2050. He says he will also work to remove from the environment all the carbon emissions the company has produced, either directly or through the consumption of electricity. Microsoft plans to achieve its new goals using a cocktail of Negative Emission Technologies (NET). These include afforestation and reforestation, soil carbon sequestration, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECC), and direct air capture (DAC).
Negative, in neutral
Microsoft has been striving to achieve carbon neutrality since 2012, primarily by investing in offsets that avoid emissions rather than actively removing carbon from the environment. Microsoft Chairman Brad Smith said the company acknowledges that its efforts to date have not been significant enough. "Neutral is not enough to meet the needs of the world," he said in a blog post. "While the world will have to go to net zero, those of us who can afford to go faster and go further should." Following its new commitment, Microsoft also announced an initiative that will leverage its technology to help vendors and customers reduce their own carbon footprint, as well as a $XNUMX billion climate innovation fund. The fund is designed to accelerate development of carbon reduction, capture and removal technologies. In the name of transparency, the company has promised to publish an annual report on environmental sustainability, which will keep the public informed about the progress of its environmental initiatives.