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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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