Alphabet, salesforce and Microsoft today jointly pledged to invest $500 million in climate technology in the future, aiming to discharge carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to prevent the earth from warming. These technology giants hope to respond to climate change through emerging technologies and call on more enterprises to respond through the influence of their global leaders.
Picture from World Economic Forum
In any case, these companies still have a lot of work to do in dealing with their own emissions. Removing carbon dioxide (CDR) is not the solution to the self pollution of large technology companies.
To be sure, the climate crisis has become so serious that leading climate experts at the United Nations admit that reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels is not enough. A major climate report released by the United Nations in April said that we must also find ways to reduce the large amount of carbon dioxide that industry has released into the atmosphere.
The UN report brings together the consensus of hundreds of experts around the world and emphasizes the very specific and limited use of CDR. Its main purpose is to solve the remaining problems of pollution accumulated since the industrial revolution and solve a small part of emissions that are still difficult to get rid of by using clean energy.
The goal of the United Nations is to limit global warming to a more controllable level of 1.5 degrees Celsius. But CDR technology is difficult to offset carbon dioxide emissions. These emissions mainly come from the heavy industry that produces products such as cement, steel, aluminum and chemicals. It also extends to heavy transportation such as shipping and aviation.
Despite a series of new climate commitments by large technology companies, emissions from many companies continue to grow. For example, Microsoft's emissions increased from about 11.6 million tons of carbon dioxide in fiscal 2020 to about 14 million tons in fiscal 2021. With the growth of business, the pollution caused by using Microsoft devices and cloud services is also increasing. Salesforces' global thermal pollution also increased with business growth in fiscal year 2022, equivalent to more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide.