YNTR: When Will Companies Finally Step Up to Fight Climate Change?

You Need to Read the New York Times When Will Companies Finally Step Up to Fight Climate Change? by Kara Swisher.

Kara Swisher’s Op-Ed take on the climate opportunity draws bold lines from Microsoft’s “carbon negative” promise to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s letter predicting “a fundamental reshaping of finance” from climate change to her own New Year’s 2020 prediction “I think the world’s first trillionaire will be a green-tech entrepreneur.” She lists areas ripe for investment (battery storage, urban mobility, renewables, climate data AI and software, food production, construction, fashion, clean energy, and electric vehicles) and what corporations can also do.

Microsoft and BlackRock have made positive moves. But there’s still a lot of money to be made in green tech.

Is a “decarbonized” future possible? That’s what Microsoft promised it would aim for when it pledged this week to go carbon negative by 2030. It added that it would attempt by 2050 to “remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975.” Also on deck: a $1 billion climate innovation fund.

 

Like a lot of other top tech companies, most of which have done this kind of thing as merely a press release, Microsoft had previously said it would eventually be carbon neutral, largely by reducing emissions and paying for carbon offsets. But with ever more evidence of devastating climate change, and a feeling that carbon neutrality is the least that big companies should do, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, doubled down, noting that “neutral is not enough to address the world’s needs.”

Her closing play on words — more like “profits of boom” than “prophets of doom” — should answer any doubt you may have about why I started off the Climate Economy Blog with her landmark article.

Bring your loved ones together this holiday season to give #GiftsToTheFuture. Each day on the way to welcoming the new year, we'll share a little something you can do to help make it (and many years that follow) better for those you love. enough.co/gifts-to-the-future

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