Microsoft plans to remove all the carbon dioxide it releases into the atmosphere by 2050, it announced today. The company is committed to turning carbon negative by 2030, meaning that it plans to reduce planet-heated carbon dioxide more than emissions.
The technology needed to make that goal a reality is still expensive and not widely available commercially, so the company also plans to spend $ 1 billion over the next four years to fund innovation in the reduction, capture, and removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The company has been emitting carbon neutral and renewable energy and carbon emissions since its inception in 2012. When it began taking internal charges for its greenhouse gases into its business units, it produced its divisions as a way to exclude emissions. According to Microsoft President Brad Smith, the move is no longer ambitious for the company, and it plans to start its new use of electricity by 2025, and by 2025 it will start charging its business with the planet’s heating gases that they supply throughout its supply chain. To help fund new climate initiatives.
“It reminds me of the old Microsoft. They’ve always done this big, sad thing, and I’m glad to see them come back on a planetary basis. The Verge is told, “Julio Friedman, a senior research scholar at Columbia University that previously led the research and development department of the Department of Energy, related to carbon capture and storage.
Microsoft’s most daring promise is to push carbon out of the atmosphere. The company is putting its faith in nascent technology and is still launching a significant investment in resolving a controversial climate. Supporters of carbon capture, such as Friedman, say that the technology is mature enough to achieve Microsoft’s goals. It is quite expensive right now. Microsoft’s support – and its $ 1 billion in cash – could ultimately make other companies looking for new ways to make the technology cheaper and more green.
Microsoft expects to have 16 million metric tons of carbon this year, which is about 4 coal-fired power plants. It can still cost up to $ 600 per ton to capture carbon dioxide from the air. At this rate, moving emissions this year alone could cost Microsoft $ 9.6 billion, leaving everything it has published since the establishment of the company in 1975.
However, as more and more people adopt negative emissions technology, prices can drop – as solar energy costs have dropped from about 1 watt per watt to 5, that has been less than $ 1 per watt in 3 years.
“The only way we can move forward is to actually take steps that can remove carbon from the environment,” Smith said at an event this week in the media. He admits, however, that “the technology we need to solve this problem is not there today, at least not in the way that it will make the world affordable and efficient.”
Carbon capture critics such as the presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders worries that relying on carbon to take it down will pressure pollutants to burn fewer fossil fuels. Carbon capture is popular in the fossil fuel industry; Together, two oil and gas companies have decided to develop 5 billion technologies simultaneously.
Microsoft has said it is committed to reducing emissions by more than half by 20. Switching to a renewable electricity source will make it part of that goal in 2021, but we have to adjust to other areas as well. The company is solely responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from its emissions, but not for the emissions from its suppliers and the pollution of customers with whom it uses the product. In Microsoft’s case, for example, the company is factoring in contamination from the materials it took to create a gaming console, the electricity that Microsoft uses for its operations, emitting shipping, and finally using any power when it plugs in and play.
To cope with climate change with negative emissions technology, Microsoft also needs to make sure that the carbon it contains has a safe and basically sustainable way of conserving it so it can’t be released again. “The devil is always in the details with it. “I think Microsoft is transparent about what they mean by carbon negatives and how they plan to get there,” Carbon-1, the executive director of the Center for NGOs before carbon removal, told East Kerno.
Microsoft is still doing business with fossil fuel companies. In September, it announced a “big deal” with oil industry giants Chevron and Schlumberger to accelerate cloud-grandson development.
