Carbon neutral, you may remember, was the word of the year back in 2006, but as my friend Joel Makower (executive editor of greenbiz.com, aka the guru of green business) has written, no one knows exactly what it means or even how to define a company’s carbon footprint.
So when Dell announced today that the company had become carbon neutral, I decided to take a closer look in my Sustainability column at fortune.com and cnnmoney.com. Here’s how the column begins:
Dell is announcing Wednesday that it has become carbon neutral by turning out the lights in its offices, buying wind power and protecting endangered forests in Madagascar.
It’s all part of CEO Michael Dell’s commitment to make the company that he started back in 1984 “the greenest technology company on the planet.”
But what, exactly, does becoming carbon neutral mean?
It turns out that there’s no agreed-upon definition of carbon neutral, even as rock groups like the Rolling Stones, events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars, and a growing number of companies have set carbon neutrality as a goal.
You can read the rest here.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Hi Marc:
For Dell to say that it is going carbon neutral by, in part, contributing towards the preservation of a carbon sink (trees in Madagascar) is to profoundly misunderstand the dynamics of carbon sources and sinks. Preserving existing carbon sinks provides no cover whatsoever for continuing to emit carbon emissions that so obviously exceed the absorptive capacity of the very same sinks. Now if Dell, on the other hand, could find a way of increasing such sinks, that part of their carbon neutrality program might be worth noting. As it is, however, it’s not.
On the sources or emissions side of the program, Dell’s reductions in emissions are equally problematic. Even lower emissions can be (and usually are) unsustainable. The question is, are Dell’s reductions grounded in a greenhouse gas stabilization plan aimed at returning such concentrations to safe levels? If so, which one, and what is the target? If not, then why should we regard Dell’s program as meaningful?
The same questions apply to any company’s so-called carbon neutral programs.
Regards,
Mark