LISBON—There was some math involved in Microsoft President Brad Smith’s climate-change keynote at the Web Summit conference here.
“The best way to talk about climate is to think about energy,” he said, pointing to a slide showing how energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions have historically climbed upwards alongside gross domestic product. “It is a curve of prosperity that every step of the way has required more and more energy.”
That leaves one way on the road ahead to stop the continued rise of temperatures from the carbon dioxide output of fossil-fuel use and other industrial activities: “We need to grow energy but cut the cord and the link between energy consumption and carbon emissions.”
Doing that, Smith continued, will involve four Rs from companies: recording how much carbon they produce, reporting that, reducing it, and finally removing it from the ecosystem.
Many enterprises have started down that path—Smith noted approvingly that 1,500 companies with $11.4 trillion in combined net revenue have pledged to become carbon neutral or net zero—but he warned against incomplete measurements and analytics.
“We need to go from carbon math to carbon accounting,” he said, then suggested governments will compel the same sort of standards that they now require in the accounting of publicly traded companies. “I don’t even think it will be a choice. It will be a requirement.”
Not unsurprisingly, his talk included a plug for one of his company’s services—the Cloud for Sustainability suite of services to help businesses track and reduce their carbon footprint that the company announced in July. But Smith also urged attendees to look not just at planting trees to take CO2 out of the air, but at companies developing “direct air capture” technology. In January, Microsoft announced a plan to pay for the removal of a million tons of carbon dioxide from the air by Climeworks, a Zurich firm that makes “DAC” machines.
As a slide showed an assembly of Climeworks CO2 scrubbers stacked up like Lego air conditioners, Smith said: “I see not just a piece of equipment that I wouldn’t have recognized a few years ago, I see a future with companies and industries that will do what the world needs to be done.”
Redmond has leaned into the issue of climate change in recent years. In January 2020, it pledged to go “carbon-negative” by 2030 and then, by 2050, “remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975.” In September of that year, the company set itself an additional goal of being “water-positive” by 2030.
DisclosureDisclosure: I’m moderating four panels at Web Summit, in return for which the organizers are covering my lodging and airfare.
