| Hi all, it's Eric. Microsoft Corp. promised to do something good Thursday. The 44-year-old company, worth $1.27 trillion, said it would be carbon negative by 2030. That's a big departure from most companies' assurances they'll go carbon neutral—a promise that often means business as usual while paying other people to pollute less. With a combination of supply chain shifts and new technology, Microsoft has pledged to effectively become a net benefit for the environment. A decade from now is a long way off, so let's not congratulate the Seattle giant too much just yet. By its own admission, adequate carbon-removal technology to meet its biggest goals doesn't exist yet. To help it along, the company will plow $1 billion into a climate innovation fund. And while $1 billion is a big number, so is $1.27 trillion. But the scale of the ambition is encouraging. Along with its tech fund and carbon-negative promise, Microsoft made an even longer-term commitment to remove all the carbon it's emitted "since it was founded in 1975." It also said that in five years, the company will rely totally on renewable energy. There are a few reasons I'm inclined to celebrate Microsoft's new project, where I might be skeptical of its peers. Obviously its one-time Chief Executive Officer Bill Gates, whose rule in the 1990s won him a cartoonishly evil reputation in Silicon Valley, has dedicated much of his time and fortune since then to improving the planet. And under Satya Nadella the company has been an early mover on other benevolent agenda items. For example, Microsoft ended arbitration agreements over sexual harassment in 2017, before many of its peers followed suit. The climate document itself is also relatively humble, as far as corporate manifestos go, lingering on the failings of its earlier carbon neutral initiatives. I'm loathe to say this about a company blog post, but it's worth a read if you want to understand the executives' thinking. Microsoft isn't alone in aiming to reduce its carbon footprint, though no other tech giants have said they'd go carbon negative. According to tech news site the Information, Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. have all also committed to relying completely on renewable energy. So has Amazon.com Inc., albeit with a longer time horizon. Of course, none of this will solve the climate crisis—too much carbon is still pumping into the air from other industries and other countries. But there's reason to think Microsoft's moves could be particularly helpful. Silicon Valley has long been apprehensive about getting back into the clean-tech sector after firms like Kleiner Perkins lost money on bad energy-focused bets about a decade ago. With a fresh influx of deep-pocketed corporate customers hoping to make good on their environmental commitments, this time could be different. With a White House that's skeptical of man's role in climate change, tech companies have an opportunity to take the lead. Even so, the next step will have to be winning over governments and other industries, at home and abroad. "This is a bold bet—a moonshot—for Microsoft," the company writes. "And it will need to become a moonshot for the world." —Eric Newcomer | 
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