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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

I know the whole "carbon footprint" thing was designed to allow big companies and governments to pretend that 7 billion people need to individually decide to change their lifestyles, to fully understand the environmental implications of the various consumer choices they make and assumes that environmentally-friendly options are already available in all cases ...

But the carbon footprint of some people I see here must be astronomical.

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I at least hope they sell/give away those machines to keep them in circulation. I'd be a real shame to have modern and environmentally expensive hardware like that be torn apart for scrap metal in a recycling facility. Many tech companies love the "eco-friendly" trade in programs that essentially serve to take working, used devices out of circulation.

For my personal machine I have a relatively new ThinkPad running linux that works perfectly well for everything that I do.

Ever since it came out I want to buy a MacBook with these new chips as my personal machine. But I haven't yet bought one because I don't need one.

Or I'll buy it when my ThinkPad dies. (Weird laughter).

And then over here I read about people replacing laptops every other year or so, and I wonder why I am the way I am.

It's mostly governments that need to change because they control land use policy. This is up to individual decisions of those 7 billion people though, because that's how voting works.

An environmentalist friend told me that my use of Terrapass is pointless and that there's no point attempting to reduce my footprint because big companies are the cause of it. So I stopped worrying about both things. This is fortunate because I've increased the amount of flying I do these days. Usually, environmentalists get in the way of things, so I was quite pleased that here was this positive development.

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