Computer giant Microsoft Corporation has set a new ambition among Fortune 500 companies in addressing climate change, pledging to remove as much carbon as it has emitted in its 45-year history.
Microsoft said it aims to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits by 2030 and hopes to have removed enough carbon to account for all the direct emissions the company has ever made by 2050.
Reuters Newsagency reports the announcement by the world’s largest software company reflects the rising profile of United States corporate action after President Donald Trump announced in 2017 his decision to pull the US out of the United Nations sponsored Paris Agreement on climate change.
“If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that technology built without these principles can do more harm than good,” Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, said.
“We must begin to offset the damaging effects of climate change.”
In a blogpost, Microsoft explained it wanted to reach its goal to cut its carbon emissions for its supply and value chain by more than half by 2030 through a portfolio of negative emission technologies, potentially including afforestation, the opposite of deforestation, creating new forests, and reforestation, soil carbon sequestration, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, and direct air capture.
It said the goal was to remove enough carbon by 2050 to account for all its emissions since its founding in 1975.
“By 2030 Microsoft will be carbon negative, and by 2050 Microsoft will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975,” the blogpost said.
The company said it would fund the efforts by expanding its internal carbon fee, a fee the company has charged to its business groups to account for their carbon emissions.
Since 2012, Microsoft has assessed the fee on direct emissions, electricity use and air travel, among other activities, but it will now expand the fee to cover all Microsoft-related emissions.
The effort “will require technology by 2030 that doesn’t fully exist today”, Brad Smith, the company president, 
, said.
“That money is used, then, for us to invest in our work to reduce our carbon emissions,” he said.
Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates was an early backer of British Columbia-based Carbon Engineering, one of a handful of companies developing direct air capture technology.
The company’s plan also includes the creation of a climate innovation fund, which will invest US$1 billion over the next four years to speed up the development of carbon removal technology.
Microsoft “is at the helm of what could be a new movement towards negative emissions”, Elizabeth Sturcken of the Environmental Defence Fund, a not-for-profit advocacy group, said in a statement.
“A company’s most powerful tool for fighting climate change is its political influence, and we’re eager to see Microsoft use it,” she added.
Reuters reports Microsoft’s announcement comes as big investors pay more attention to how companies will tackle climate change, and as employees are putting growing pressure to do more.
In November, more than 1000 Google workers signed a public letter calling on their employer to commit to an aggressive “company-wide climate plan” that includes cancelling contracts with the fossil fuel industry and halting its donations to climate change deniers.
Several Amazon employees have banded together to call for climate action, and thousands of tech workers participated in the September 2019 global climate strike, including contingents from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Square.
Microsoft and Amazon have come under fire from activist tech workers who have demanded that they stop supplying technology to oil and gas companies because of the polluting nature of fossil-fuel extraction.
Microsoft in 2017 announced a multi-year deal to sell cloud services to US energy giant Chevron Corporation.
In its blogpost, Microsoft reiterated its commitment to working with oil and gas companies.
“It’s imperative that we enable energy companies to transition, including to renewable energy and to the development and use of negative emission technologies like carbon capture and storage and direct air capture,” Microsoft said.
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