Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella has called climate change "the defining issue of our generation," launching a bold "moonshot" strategy to become a carbon-negative business by 2030 (aka removing more pollution than it emits) and investing $1 billion in climate innovations.
In an exclusive interview with The Cool Down, the company's chief sustainability officer, Melanie Nakagawa — who's charged with helping the tech giant achieve that moonshot — challenged companies to speak out about climate issues instead of "green hushing," and she remained bullish on the company's sustainability goals despite power-hungry AI tech entering the chat.
"I think it's really important for companies to use their voice and their engagement and their platform to talk about the things that they're doing," Nakagawa told TCD. "Storytelling and the sharing of best practices is just so important right now."
So now that we're nearly halfway through the decade to 2030 (!), how is the global tech giant tracking to reach its ambitious goals? Here's our conversation with Nakagawa.
👍 Can AI be a force for good?
"For AI, these new technologies, especially generative AI in particular, hold a tremendous promise for new innovations that can help address the climate crisis," Nakagawa said.
"It can help minimize and help measure and predict and optimize really complex systems. So you think about wildfires or extreme weather events. AI has an incredible ability to reason over large data sets and help get you access to better information and make better decisions."
For example, AI can help predict hurricane strength, make agricultural practices more efficient, detect invasive species, and address food insecurity.
"It can also help accelerate new solutions," Nakagawa said. "Think about the covid vaccine [or] battery technology. It can help rapidly expedite the scientific method. So rather than trial and error, you have the ability to rapidly do that trial and error in a much faster period of time."
👎 How is AI challenging climate goals?
In 2020, Microsoft laid out those 2030 "moonshot" sustainability goals to be:
• Carbon negative mainly by getting more energy from clean, carbon-free sources and reducing emissions from its supply chain
• Water positive by reducing water consumption, replenishing water the company consumes, providing access to safe drinking water to 1.5 million people, and investing in policy and innovation around water
• Zero waste by investing in the circular economy
In the past few years since making these climate commitments, though, Microsoft's carbon footprint has expanded — like many other tech companies' — thanks in large part to recent investments in AI, a data-heavy and energy-intensive operation. Microsoft's carbon footprint is now almost 30% higher than it was in 2020, when it set those ambitious goals.
So what's next for juggling AI growth and sustainability strategies?
"The infrastructure and the electricity needed for these technologies create challenges for meeting sustainability commitments across the tech sector … we have to make sure we're doing this sustainably. And we're all working really hard to address these concerns," Nakagawa said.
She added that balancing AI and sustainability is all about making sure "we minimize the resources used in our technology." That means making sure the company is building with lower-carbon materials in the first place, including chips with lower carbon footprints in its tech products.
"It's also about making sure that we are powering these [AI] data centers with clean power and carbon-free sources of power," Nakagawa said. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced a $10 billion renewable energy deal to help power its data centers in the U.S. and Europe with 10.5 gigawatts of power from wind, solar, and other carbon-free tech. That partnership "really shows that while we rapidly scale technology like generative AI, we're also rapidly scaling the energy resources … in a sustainable way."
According to Nakagawa, if the company can scale both clean energy and carbon-free power at the same time, "we continue to stay steadfast on our commitments."
💸 The Climate Innovation Fund: What does $1 billion get you?
In 2020, when Microsoft announced its climate goals, it also pledged $1 billion to accelerate climate-related innovations and solutions beyond its own operations.
Four years later, and Microsoft has made more than 50 investments in new tech and startup companies, deploying around $760 million of that total $1 billion. "It's really fun to get a chance to scan the landscape of all the innovative technology solutions that are out there," Nakagawa noted.
Nakagawa wasn't with Microsoft yet at the announcement of those goals, as she was the director of climate strategy for an investment fund supporting tech companies and then worked on the White House's National Security Council focused on climate and energy issues. If anything, those experiences before Microsoft may have given her unusual insight into just how much innovation is out there.
One example she mentioned is Microsoft's investment in H2 Green Steel, a startup working to mitigate one of the world's dirtiest industries, steel, which — although it is recycled at a high rate — contributes roughly 8% of global carbon emissions. H2 Green Steel, on the other hand, "produces a steel that they expect will be 95% lower carbon than conventional steel," Nakagawa said.
Microsoft is also funding an ambitious startup that turns pollution into sustainable aviation fuel, as well as a company that can recycle EV batteries, among other cool new tech.
💾 Repair, recycle, and trade in your electronics
Microsoft is leaning into repairability and reuse, aiming for fixable tech, not trashable tech, as well as offering spare parts on the Microsoft Store. Users can also use a trade-in program to get paid for returning their old electronics.
"Our latest generation of Surface laptops are the most repairable devices on the market today," Nakagawa told us, "which means it helps reduce how much of that waste is going back into the ecosystem."
Additionally, "We built something called Circular Centers that are co-located next to a few of our data centers. These are facilities that'll take back and harvest old server parts, put them into reuse, and refurbish what we can. And that helps us contribute to a zero-waste future."
💚 Where do you find hope in the sustainability space?
For Nakagawa, three things come to mind.
1: "We're seeing a rapid increase in solutions, entrepreneurs, and new technologies that are developing to help us tackle this really difficult challenge. And that gives me a lot of hope."
2: "The second thing is you've got incredible people working in this space. I get the privilege to work with a great team at Microsoft, but I get to go and attend events and conferences and meet just an incredible variety of people that are dedicating their passion, their time, their expertise to solving the challenge."
3: "The third area that gives me optimism and hope is that there still remains a lot of energy in tackling these hard crises. I think there's a lot of sometimes, you know, negative press out there about how hard this is or extreme weather events, and that can make people really pessimistic. But where I get excited is that there still remains a lot of climate optimism to tackle this challenge."
🤝 How can tech companies work together to find innovative solutions?
"I learned a lot from my colleagues and other businesses. The thing we keep on finding is oftentimes some of their challenges are shared challenges in our supply chain as well, and what could we do together with stakeholders like nonprofits and governments to really help shift the tide so that a lot of these solutions we're going to need by 2030 and beyond can actually happen," Nakagawa said.
💡 Your lightbulb moment?
"Paris during the 2015 climate negotiations, where I got to watch these worlds come together and it wasn't a done deal until that very final moment."
Nakagawa continued: "Through partnership, through broad stakeholder engagement, really big things can happen. You could really bring the entire world together to solve … an existential challenge [like] the climate challenge."
"You look a year later and the sweeping number of climate policies that were passed in the wake of the Paris Agreement and continue to be passed, including the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States, was sort of that moment of — the shift of the ship is possible."
🛍️ What sustainable product can't you live without?
"Definitely my reusable bag," Nakagawa said. "I studied abroad in Amsterdam many moons ago and they were already on reusable bags at that point. And so I'm glad that now it's mainstream here in the United States."
Anna Robertson conducted this interview for The Cool Down.
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