Alphabet, Microsoft and Salesforce today pledged $500 million for a new climate technology designed to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to prevent it from heating the planet. It’s the latest move by Big Tech to spearhead emerging technology while portraying itself as a global leader in taking action on climate change.
Regardless, these companies still have a lot of work to do to manage their own emissions. Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is not the solution to Big Tech’s own pollution.
Certainly the climate crisis has gotten so bad that the United Nations’ top climate experts are recognizing that reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels will no longer be enough. We must also find ways to remove tons of CO2 that industry has already pumped into the atmosphere, according to a major United Nations climate report released in April.
These companies still have work to do to manage their own emissions
The UN report, which gathers the consensus of hundreds of experts around the world, highlights rather specific, limited uses for CDR. It is primarily intended to address the legacy of pollution accumulated since the industrial revolution and address a small portion of current emissions that are still really hard to get rid of using clean energy sources.
Specifically, the UN report states that “CDR to offset hard-to-reduce residual emissions is unavoidable” in scenarios that limit global warming to a more manageable level of 1.5 degrees Celsius. In climate policy jargon, “residual emissions that are difficult to reduce” typically come from just a few sectors. This includes heavy industry, which makes things like cement, steel, aluminum, and chemicals. It also extends to heavy-duty transport such as shipping and aviation.
These industries are under as much pressure to decarbonize as Big Tech. But there are special considerations for heavy industry because it’s still much more difficult to fire a kiln or fuel an airplane with renewable energy. Batteries are not advanced enough to power large, electrified ships and airplanes over long distances without weighing them down. Cement is responsible for a significant portion of the world’s carbon emissions, but some of that CO2 comes from a chemical reaction in the manufacturing process – not from burning energy. Because of this, these types of industries may rely more heavily on technologies that remove CO2 after it has already been emitted, compared to other sectors.
These industries are under as much pressure to decarbonize as Big Tech
The World Economic Forum last year launched an initiative called the First Mover Coalition — which includes Microsoft, Salesforce and Alphabet — aimed at tackling these hard-to-reduce emissions.
But every other polluter outside of these hard-to-reduce sectors, including big tech, are expected to prevent – if not eliminate – the vast majority of their emissions. Technology companies may have some residual emissions, perhaps from heavy industry in their supply chains, that they would like to extract after they are already in the atmosphere. But for tech companies that derive much of their business and associated emissions from data centers, there’s little excuse not to prevent much of their pollution in the first place.
Tech giants pumping up carbon removal say they are building up the fledgling CDR market to make it easier for other companies to jump on board. Getting more supporters at this early stage is intended to make carbon removal more affordable so it can scale up dramatically.
Back in April, Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and others made a combined $925 million commitment to purchase captured carbon this decade. In 2020, Microsoft pledged to remove more carbon dioxide than it emits by 2030. Microsoft will “serve as an expert partner by sharing lessons learned from its carbon removal auctions,” says the World Economic Forum of the new $500 million pledge made by Big Tech in Davos.
But despite the flood of new climate promises from big tech, emissions from many companies continue to rise. Microsoft’s emissions, for example, increased from about 11.6 million tons of CO2 in fiscal 2020 to about 14 million tons in fiscal 2021. As the business grew, so did pollution from the use of Microsoft devices and cloud services. Salesforce’s pollution of the planet has similarly grown with its business in fiscal year 2022 to the equivalent of over 1 million tonnes of CO2.
Primarily through carbon offsetting, both companies pay to offset enough of their emissions to say they are carbon neutral. But offset projects like forest conservation and tree planting don’t have a good track record when it comes to actually permanently removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Emissions from many companies continue to rise
Plans to build the carbon removal market include efforts to make it more reliable than traditional offsets. But right now, the only guaranteed way to avert the climate crisis is to prevent pollution in the first place. And Big Tech is still responsible for a lot of pollution; Much of this could be avoided with a faster transition to clean energy. This deserves as much attention, if not more, than CDR gets.
“We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, but we also rely on a global system that needs to change,” said Max Scher, senior director of sustainability at Salesforce, in an email to The Verge. “We are focused on what the science tells us to limit warming to 1.5°C,” Scher said, citing renewable energy, nature-based solutions and “the carbon removal that we will need in the coming decades.” Salesforce has committed to purchase $100 million in carbon removal credits as part of today’s larger commitment.
Microsoft didn’t immediately comment on The Verge. Neither does Google, whose greenhouse gas emissions have fallen slightly since 2018.