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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.
We have all seen the viral photos of eye-popping numbers on price signs at Southern California gas stations. But the exact cost to American drivers nationwide hadn’t yet been quantified. Until now. Researchers at Brown University gave Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer a sneak peak at their new Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, a hub for the team’s analysis and data. The war has cost the U.S. economy about $17 billion solely by increasing prices for gasoline and diesel fuel, the estimates show. The higher prices amount to a hike of $129 per household so far. “If you think about an individual paying $1 or $1.50 more for gasoline, that’s often just a nuisance,” Jeff Colgan, an author of the analysis and a political science professor at Brown University, told Rob. “But as a country, we consume 370 million gallons of gasoline per day. So when you add that all up, this is more than just a nuisance for the country. This is a major cost.”
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When the Trump administration became the biggest shareholder in MP Materials last summer, Biden-era officials admitted to Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin that they were jealous of their Republican successors who marshalled the political will to experiment with quasi-nationalization. But at least one former official from President Joe Biden’s White House has a different take. “Bottom line: the MP deal is both too much & not enough,” Brian Deese, the former director of the National Economic Council, wrote in a post on X, announcing the findings of a new paper he co-authored at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The deal delivers unprecedented support to one firm, creating new risks without long-term resilience.”
Uranium Energy Corp., meanwhile, has started up production at its Burke Hollow mine in Texas. It’s the first new mining operation using in-situ recovery, a process that includes chemical leaching out of ore. It’s the first new facility of its kind in the U.S. in more than a decade, World Nuclear News reported.
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Volkswagen is shifting production at its Chattanooga plant from the ID.4 electric SUV to the large Atlas SUV. The ID.4 will remain available throughout the U.S., and “future models are planned,” but the German automaker said it’s “exploring pathways for a new vehicle model to be assembled.” Instead, the facility will focus on churning out the Atlas, Volkswagen’s second-most popular vehicle. EVs “continue to challenge” the industry, requiring what the company called measured decisions. “The Chattanooga plant has been, and will continue to be, a cornerstone of Volkswagen’s strategy in the United States,” Volkswagen Group of America President and CEO Kjell Gruner said in a press release. “This strategic shift underscores the company’s commitment to Chattanooga and its workforce as we position the plant for long-term success and future product opportunities.”
A national map showing the paper’s findings. Nature
A team of scientists at Princeton University and the University of Arizona produced what the Los Angeles Times called “the most extensive estimate of the country’s groundwater to date.” The researchers took data from about 800,000 wells and applied a machine-learning model to project the depth of the water table in each location. The findings, published in Nature, could help local policymakers decide how to handle overpumping from stressed aquifers. “Groundwater is out of sight and out of mind for most people,” Reed Maxwell, a hydrologist at Princeton and co-author of the study, told the newspaper. “Knowing how much we have will be helpful in knowing how to use it wisely.”
The population of Antarctic fur seals, the smallest of the polar seals which live almost exclusively on the island of South Georgia, halved over the last 25 years, from 2.2 million adults in 1999 to 944,000 in 2025, Mongabay reported. Global experts now say half of the population loss is due to reduced food availability as warmer temperatures and shrinking sea ice spur large schools of krill, the seal’s main prey, into deeper and colder waters. To boot, the seals are facing more competition for their food. High-quality krill now appears in tins at supermarkets in New York City. But really demand is surging for use in fish farming.
