Microsoft President Brad Smith, Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood and CEO Satya Nadella preparing to announce Microsoft’s plan to be carbon negative by 2030. (Jan. 15, 2020/Photo by Brian Smale)

By David Dennis

Last week, Microsoft, the company for which I’ve worked for nearly twenty years, announced an ambitious goal and a new plan to reduce and ultimately remove its carbon footprint. 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.

Working for Microsoft has allowed me to travel the world, learn from brilliant peers and managers, amplify my charitable contributions here in Santa Cruz, and create products that are used by tens of millions of people each day. The nearly 150,000 full-time employees at Microsoft work together to advance our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. That mission has always filled me with a sense of pride, and the surge I felt during our sustainability announcement was as profound. What I heard, what the world heard, was an announcement that will set the bar for climate action for not just the broader tech industry but for all industries.

The science is clear that an increase in carbon dioxide emissions is the primary driver of rising global temperatures. And the scientific community has concluded, human activity has released more than 2 trillion metric tons of greenhouse gases into the Earth’s atmosphere since the start of the First Industrial Revolution in the mid-1700s. Over three-quarters of this is carbon dioxide, with most of this carbon emitted since the mid-1950s. This is more carbon than nature can re-absorb, and every year humanity pumps more than 50 billion metric tons of additional greenhouse gases into the air. This isn’t a problem that lasts a few years or even a decade. Once excess carbon enters the atmosphere it can take thousands of years to dissipate.

Microsoft’s operations have been carbon neutral since 2012, but the notion of carbon negativity is new. As I watched our announcement, I began to imagine what it would mean for every person, every company, every industry on the planet to erase all the carbon they’ve ever been responsible for generating. Reversing carbon’s impact must by our goal as a civilization. This is the kind of thinking that can get us there.

I recognize that Microsoft alone cannot solve climate change, but we’ve created a plan for ourselves with clear goals to measure and report on our progress. And we’ll be helping others in our supply chain and beyond to do the same. I believe that this sort of leadership, and the leadership of others like us, will inspire many to make similar commitments and that, in turn, will begin to create the change we so desperately need.

This will not be easy, and while commitments to reforestation are possible today, in many cases, the technology needed to remove all the excess carbon from the environment doesn’t yet exist. But, when we make such a need a priority, the innovation will come.

Reducing carbon is where the world needs to go, and we recognize that it’s what our customers and employees are asking us to pursue. This is a bold bet — a moonshot — for Microsoft, and it needs to become a moonshot for the world.

After work, on the day of Microsoft’s announcement, I went for a surf near my house on the Westside. I hadn’t expected to connect my “day job” to my surf session that day, but I was struck by the potential impact of rising sea levels on our local surf breaks. Just a few feet of sea level rise will mean some breaks will be gone forever, and continuing sea level rise will ensure that many beach communities will be devasted in ways we can only begin to imagine. We must start the difficult journey of reversing carbon’s impact now through a concerted effort by individuals, businesses, industries, and governments.

I encourage everyone to read more about how Microsoft is stepping up to the challenge and to think about how you can challenge yourself and your businesses in similar ways.

Photo by Salty Breeze Art & Photography

David Dennis is a principal program manager at Microsoft working on the Outlook.com product team. He is also the co-founder of Ventana Surfboards & Supplies, the world’s most environmentally responsible surf company. David lives and works on the Westside of Santa Cruz.

Microsoft’s Plan to be Carbon Negative is the Corporate Leadership We Need