That's assuming that "renewable energy certificates" can actually compensate for releasing CO2. Last time I checked, the jury was still out on that one.
Offsets are fine in principle, there are huge numbers of ways to sequester carbon verifiably. The problem is chaos in the market which makes it difficult to see who is doing the verification and how, combined with (in some cases) legitimate uncertainty in the science as to how much carbon is being stored by the technique.
Planting forests is by far the cheapest trick, but the hardest to pin down as to numeric effects. Add to that uncertainty as to what the guarantees are on land use (i.e. how sure are we it won't be logged and cleared for cropland in 100 years) and the whole area is a huge mess. It's why I haven't purchased any offsets for myself yet.
So yeah, the "jury is still out" I guess. But the idea is sound, as are most of the techniques. The problems are technical and bureaucratic, not fundamental. Carbon offsets will get there. It's just a maturing field of business.
Not sure I understand the vitriol. I'm just saying that it takes a non-zero amount of energy to manufacture things. Since the majority of our energy comes from fossil fuel sources, it is very difficult to manufacture anything without carbon emissions.
In case you missed it in the article:
They even did things in the right order. First, they started with efficiency measures in their operations around the world,
So Dell started with conservation first and bought the certificates last.
I can't stand this attitude in environmentalism, that it's better to do nothing until you come up with the perfect, ultimate solution to some environmental problem.
There's nothing wrong with handling environmental problems incrementally.
I can't stand the attitude where corporations think they are "green" if they buy some securities that say they are. This is just a "cost of business" now but some day it will be too late to fix the problem.
Interesting that Dell is outpacing Apple in this space.
I'm not a huge Dell fan, but the way Dell has embraced their customers desires is something pretty awesome to behold. When "Linux laptops" was the most requested item in their first user poll, they announced a range of Ubuntu laptops soon after. Going green was another high ranking request...and it seems that while it took them a little longer to bring it to fruition, they've done it.
I may end up with yet another Dell next time I buy a laptop, and not just because they're cheap...I might even buy my next desktop from them (and I've never bought a pre-built desktop PC...the last brand name desktop machine I bought was an Amiga).
Dell is trying to make up for the decreasing quality of their machines and their poor customer service. I'm betting declining sales is also the reason for their decision to start putting Dell machines in retail stores.
I applaud them for putting out Ubuntu laptops, but I doubt I would ever buy a computer from them again. I'll stick to building my own desktops and buying Apple when it comes to laptops. All their efforts to put out Ubuntu laptops and go green won't make up for the fact that I had to waste over a week with their customer service to replace a broken hard drive (especially when I paid extra for next-day on-site support)
I've not been a Dell consumer often enough or recently enough to really know about declining quality. My current Dell has been solid, but it's a few years old now, so things could have gotten worse since then. It does have a crappy audio signal flaw (the power is fed into the ADC unfiltered so it has an atrocious buzz when recording), which apparently existed through multiple revisions of the board, without a fix from Dell, despite awareness of the problem and dozens of posts in the Dell forums about it (I guess a redesign was more expensive than sending a USB audio adapter to the few people who complained).
Anyway, I'm tempted by the XPS M1330, which has gotten excellent reviews, and lots of recommendations from HN readers and on reddit. I am about due for a new lappy...the Asus and Thinkpads also look good, but Dell being a bit greener certainly isn't a bad thing.
There are a few things that concerns me about some of these claims (and Yahoo who I work for claim this too).
It removes the impetuous inside the company to reduce carbon wastage because they just offset instead.
I'm not convinced by the way they claim to measure the carbon use. At Yahoo flights are often booked at the last minute, people often get rental cars when travelling, etc. I doubt that anyone has a full grasp of the real cost of carbon in the company, let alone an external organisation charged with offsetting for us.
I couldn't care less whether my vendor is carbon neutral. I sure would care if they opened recycling centers in the U.S., rather than shipping waste overseas to poison the poor.
The point I was making is about whether people should make computer purchases based on carbon emissions. I think people would be insane to sacrifice their own happiness by using a computer they do not prefer just to buy from the company with a good carbon record.
I am not taking a position on whether carbon emissions are important. I'm just saying that having the computer you want is very important. If you want to cut back on carbon, do it somewhere else.
Please note that this is not a matter of apathy, it is a matter of respect for human beings and desire for them to have good computing experiences.
There are a great many people -- the majority, in fact -- who don't particularly care about the brand of computer they buy. The average motivations are whether it's cheap, and whether it looks good with the furniture.
A lot of people -- and not just the cloth-bag-carrying, recycle-bin-sorting type -- will care enough about the environmental impact of what they buy for this effort from Dell to make a difference.
I think as "hackers" it's easy for some of us to overestimate just how much joy a computer brings into someone's life, or how important it is to them.
I guess I can appreciate your comment from the perspective of a hacker, however, where do you draw the line? Theoretically, if the nicer brand was made with child-slave labor, is your decision the same?
