

Dell announces it is now 100% carbon neutral, 5 months ahead of schedule - MikeCapone
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/08/dell-100-percent-carbon-neutral-habitat-conservation-madagascar.php

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jrockway
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.

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briancooley
Short of shutting down operations, any business would have a hard time
reaching carbon neutrality without certificates.

They increased energy efficiency across their operations, which is the most
important thing.

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jrockway
_Short of shutting down operations, any business would have a hard time
reaching carbon neutrality without certificates._

Oh, that makes it OK then! I will tell the environment that we just can't
conserve anymore, so it should harden up and deal with it.

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thaumaturgy
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.

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jrockway
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.

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echair
Carbon offsets aren't merely securities. You're actually buying power.

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SwellJoe
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).

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cstejerean
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)

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SwellJoe
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.

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sh1mmer
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.

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hapless
When are they going to be "poison neutral" ?

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.

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qqq
Umm, congrats, but I am still going to buy a computer based on which computer
I want to own.

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ajross
So basically, you're saying you don't care about the linked article. Congrats.
:)

Why bother posting that? More to the point, who is upvoting this, and why?

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qqq
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.

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thaumaturgy
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.

