Inside the Microsoft Carbon Fee

In this sustainability guest blog, Microsoft’s director of corporate citizenship, Steve Lipman, highlights the company’s approach to creating and implementing an internal carbon price and fee.

Two years ago, Microsoft made a commitment to make our operations carbon neutral: to achieve net zero emissions for our data centers, software development labs, offices, and employee business air travel in over 100 countries around the world.

To achieve this goal, we have implemented an internal carbon fee, which places a price on carbon and aims to improve energy efficiency, increase our purchase of renewable energy, improve data collection and reporting, and further aligns to our ongoing goal of reducing our environmental impact. Our internal carbon fee is based on current market pricing for renewable energy and carbon offsets and makes our business groups across Microsoft financially responsible for the cost to offset their carbon emissions

With two years of experience implementing the carbon fee, we’ve sought to share our learnings broadly with other, recently releasing a “Carbon Fee Playbook” that provides a comprehensive overview of our approach to creating and implementing an internal carbon price and fee.

The guide provides a five-step process that any interested company or organization can take and customize for inclusion in future business and financial strategies. It is designed for leaders who are interested in learning more about Microsoft’s fee, why it might be helpful to their organization, and how to go about implementation.

Our hope with this guide is exactly that, to demonstrate how the creation of a carbon fee model can be simplified, and what a large impact it can make on an organization to drive behavior change.

We appreciate Verizon’s work on environmental sustainability and the opportunity they’ve given us to share our Carbon Fee Playbook with others.

Follow more of Microsoft’s green news here.