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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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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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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