What you need to know
- West Virginia is taking on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in court.
- The issue at hand is whether the EPA has the authority to cap CO2 emissions via the Clean Air Act.
- Microsoft and a multitude of major tech companies have filed a brief in support of the EPA, asking that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) not side with West Virginia.
Microsoft is once again putting its feet in the political pond, alongside an assortment of its peers and rivals, including Meta, Google, and Amazon. They've all banded together to file a brief in support of the EPA, asking that there not be new limitations placed on the agency's greenhouse gas emissions regulatory powers.
To really boil it down: Microsoft and some of the biggest players in Big Tech want the EPA to retain its power to issue limits on greenhouse gas emissions, despite West Virginia's petitions.
In the brief, Microsoft outlines its personal commitment to sustainability. "Microsoft is committed to shifting to a 100% supply of renewable energy by 2025 and being carbon negative by 2030 for all scopes of its emissions," states Redmond's opening line. "By 2050, Microsoft will remove from the environment all the carbon that the company has emitted either directly or indirectly by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975."
The full statement is a bit longer, so it's worth checking the brief for the entire quote as well as to find out what other companies had to say.
It shouldn't come as much of a surprise Microsoft is taking this stance given the company's recent emphasis on eco-friendly tech and projects. It's been investing in geo-exchange fields to combat carbon emissions, experimenting with energy-efficient server cooling methods, and loads more.
On the software side, Microsoft is also helping other companies reach their sustainability goals via offerings such as the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.
