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It’s not yet clear whether the company could still increase its investment in existing projects or when it might resume purchases in the future.
In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson denied that the company was indefinitely pausing all of its purchases. “We continually review and assess our carbon removal portfolio along with market conditions for the optimal balance on our path to carbon negative,” she said.
Industry data suggests that Microsoft has done more than any other private company — and arguably any organization on Earth — to support early-stage technologies that could withdraw or eliminate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
It has purchased 45 million tons of carbon removal, according to its own releases. The next-largest buyer of carbon removal credits — Frontier, a coalition of large companies led by the payments processing firm Stripe — has bought 1.8 million tons of carbon removal.
Microsoft made 90% of all carbon removal purchases worldwide last year, according to data from the third-party industry monitor CDR.fyi. The company is generally cited as making somewhere between 79% to 90% of all historic carbon removal purchases.
Microsoft also published guidelines about what it considered “ideal” carbon removal projects, setting de facto early industry standards for technologies including direct air capture, soil carbon management, and enhanced rock weathering.
The tech company has backed carbon removal in large part to meet its aggressive internal climate goals. Microsoft has pledged to become “carbon negative” by 2030, meaning that it must remove more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than it emits within four years. The company also aims to eliminate its half century of historic carbon emissions by 2050.
Like other major tech firms, including Google and Meta, Microsoft has struggled to square its years-old climate goals with the urgent need to power energy-hungry AI data centers. But it has generally been seen as more environmentally friendly than other tech firms.
When Heatmap polled climate insiders late last year, Microsoft and Google were seen as the two AI tech developers who were “best” on climate. (Meta and Amazon got failing marks.)
Microsoft was making carbon removal announcements as recently as this week. It announced its most recent purchase of CDR credits only three days ago, when it bought more than 620,000 tons of credits from an indigenous-owned bioenergy carbon capture and storage project in Saskatchewan, Canada.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change considers carbon removal — technologies and methods that can reduce the amount of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere on century-long time scales — to be essential to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate goals.
By 2050, the world will need to remove 7 to 9 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year in order to hold to its Paris targets, according to an independent 2024 report.
Microsoft’s apparent pause comes at a lean time for the carbon removal industry, because the Trump administration has declined to spend — and in some cases even reassigned — funds previously authorized to encourage the development of the technology. For instance, the Energy Department says it plans to use more than $500 million in carbon removal funding to prop up aging coal plants.
Congress has been more generous to carbon removal, which has historically drawn more bipartisan support than other clean energy technologies. The 2026 federal spending law included more than $116 million to support carbon removal research and set up a federal purchasing program. With Microsoft’s shift, that purchasing scheme will be more important than ever.
The ceasefire deal allows both Iran and Oman to charge a toll on ships attempting to navigate the strait, according to the Associated Press. A 10-point peace proposal previously submitted to the U.S. by Iran, using Pakistan as an intermediary, includes a provision for a $2 million fee, The New York Times reported Monday. In a separate post on Truth Social, Trump called the proposal a “workable basis on which to negotiate,” though Oman’s transit minister has since rejected the idea of a toll. Oil prices plunged in response to the news, falling below $100 per barrel in after-hours trading.
The Environmental Protection Agency has finalized its changes to the last administration’s methane standards for oil and gas operations. The EPA had first proposed what Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo called the nation’s “strongest methane rules yet” back in December 2023. In a statement, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin accused his predecessors of trying “to regulate the oil and gas industry out of existence,” and called the changes “another step to fix those mistakes while proving we can both protect human health and the environment and grow the economy at the same time.”
E&E News described the regulatory changes as “minor” and “tweaks.” But the Sierra Club said the overhaul would allow producers to waste more gas by burning it at oil wells, a heavily polluting process known as flaring. “The Trump EPA’s move to loosen restrictions on gas flaring at oil wells is a massive step backward for public health, the climate, and economic common sense,” Mahyar Sorour, the Sierra Club’s policy director for the Beyond Fossil Fuels campaign, said in a statement. “Allowing more flaring will drive up harmful emissions, worsening smog and soot pollution in already overburdened communities while accelerating the climate crisis. At the same time, while families across the country are struggling to afford their energy bills, EPA is making it even worse with this action.”
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Founded in California 147 years ago, Chevron built an oil empire from the United States. But the giant, which recently relocated its headquarters to Houston, is expected to contribute nearly 13 times more in tax dollars to the Canadian government than the American Treasury for its 2025 operations. It’s set to pay 11 times as much to Australia, five times as much to Kazakhstan, and four times as much to Saudi Arabia and Nigeria each. In total, just 2% of the tax dollars Chevron is shelling out for 2025 are going to the U.S. government. For Exxon Mobil, that figure was just under 9%. A little over 22% of ConocoPhillips’ tax payments, meanwhile, are headed to Washington. That’s all according to a new analysis by the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks money flows. Overall, the three American supermajors are on pace to pay an average tax rate of just 6.1% on their domestic income in 2025, “a dramatic decrease” from the 10% average rate for those same companies between 2018 and 2024 and less than a third of the statutory 21% corporate tax rate, the report found.
The Kudankulam nuclear plant, India’s largest atomic power station. Pallava Bagla/Corbis via Getty Images
Since commissioning its first nuclear power station in October 1969, India has dreamed of atomic autonomy. Of the two dozen reactors New Delhi built at more than half a dozen plants, the vast majority were pressurized heavy water reactors that could run on raw uranium, eliminating the need for enriched fuel. With few uranium deposits on the subcontinent, India laid plans in the early 2000s to eventually transition its fleet to running on thorium, a more abundant but never commercialized fuel. In between, the government decided to follow a pathway the U.S. walked back in the mid-20th century: fast breeder reactors. Such machines generate plutonium through the atom-splitting process, producing or “breeding” more fuel than the fission consumes. On Monday, India’s Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor split atoms for the first time, following more than two decades of construction work. The Indian reactor is designed to transmute thorium-232, which is plentiful in the country, into uranium-233, which can be used as fuel. Once operational, the reactor would be one of just two commercial fast breeder reactors worldwide, following the first in Russia. “Today, India takes a defining step in its civil nuclear journey, advancing the second stage of its nuclear program,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a statement, according to World Nuclear News. “It is a decisive step towards harnessing our vast thorium reserves in the third stage of the program. A proud moment for India.”
China, meanwhile, has poured the first concrete for its latest nuclear reactor. The state-owned China National Nuclear Company announced that construction is underway on Unit 2 of the Jingqimen nuclear power station in Zhejiang province, NucNet reported. CNNC plans to build six gigawatt-sized Hualong Ones, China’s leading indigenous reactor design, at the site just south of Shanghai. In a sign of just how quickly things move in China, the National Nuclear Safety Administration issued a construction license for Units 1 and 2 at Jingqimen in February 2025. First concrete was poured for Unit 1 in August 2025.
Not content with what its leaders admit was the “historic mistake” of killing off nuclear energy, Germany is poised to adopt a policy change that could hurt yet another source of clean firm power. A planned amendment to the Renewable Energy Sources Act to end support for projects of up to 25 kilowatts aims to phase out subsidies for small-scale solar farms. But the tweak will also affect more than half of the country’s roughly 7,300 hydropower plants, according to BDW, a trade association representing the dam owners. “This measure, which is actually aimed at avoiding fluctuating feed-in, makes no sense at all for hydropower,” BDW president Hans-Peter Lang told Renewables Now. The trade group called for the German government to not only scrap the proposal but add a new subsidiary to support hydropower plants below 100 kilowatts.
Most of the world is struggling with soaring petrochemical prices as the main ingredients in all kinds of chemical components — oil and gas — surge amid the most severe shock in modern history to global hydrocarbon flows. Not China. Joining a distinguished club that includes Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, Beijing has maintained its domestic supply of chemicals by forging an enormous sector around converting coal into chemicals. Over in Bloomberg, columnist Javier Blas quantified just how big the coal-to-chemicals sector is in China. On its own, the sector is larger than the entire U.S. coal market.
