I wanted to thank Katie Fehrenbacher at Earth2Tech for cutting Dell a little slack in the face of recent criticism of their carbon neutral claims. She doesn’t give them a free ride, but at least she recognizes that their efforts have some real value whether they offset 100% or 5% of their emissions as claimed by the Wall Street Journal.

I don’t want to get into the debate about Dell’s footprint or the value of offsets. Working for an offset provider, my perspective is quite obvious. I merely want to remind readers to give Dell some credit for taking the steps. As a follower of the offset industry, I’ve watched companies take this kind of heat again and again. It starts to seem like every time a company tries to do something good, it isn’t good enough, and that they’d be better off on the business-as-usual trajectory.

I am all for transparency and clearly defining the boundaries of “carbon neutral” claims, but it is hard to do all of that in a sound bite. So for better or worse, the term “carbon neutral” is here to stay. I think offsetting 100% of Scope I and II emissions as defined by the World Resources Institute is about as close to a definition of “carbon neutral” as we can get everyone to agree on. So let’s get on with neutralizing the carbon and avoid discouraging companies and people from getting started.