Because they're so much more capable of soaking up CO2 and making O2 than say, I dunno, the worlds soylent!

/sarcasm

Serious questions: How many years does it take for the tree to offset the CO2 from manufacture? In that time how many laptops are sold? Last question... How much space is there in cumbria?

Talk about a non-impact solution while jumping on the "climate change" bandwagon.

Wonder if it'll sell laptops...

Why cant Toshiba offer Fidelity Offestting? I pay £1 on my laptop to pay for a guy not to cheat on my significant other. Then I get to sleep around guilt free

Carbon offsetting is one of the most disingenuous schemes for making money by falsely lightening people's consciences. It's only a few steps behind Bio-fuels, grown in the tropics on land which has been freed for this lucrative trade by slash'n'burn.

The aviation industry is the worst. Because people are focussing on CO2 rather than pollution, they give the false impression of making carbon neutral your weekend throwing up in shop doorways in Prague rather than Bradford - while getting away with pretending that the ground and stratospheric NOX's and the meteorological vandalism wrought by contrails don't matter.

Let's get this clear: crapping all over the planet and spending a few quid for someone to plant some non-native species of trees doesn't count. Consolidating your datacentre, then filling it up with blades which put some shitty animation in an unwanted browser pop-up is not eco-friendly.

Try saving your money or, better still, buying a gift from Oxfam Unwrapped, so an African farmer can put crops into his land, rather than the whole area turning into a dust bowl.

As you can get the trees with a computer, shouldn't they be classed as OEM equipment, so cannot be sold separately?

hear hear!

environmentalism is the new big industry. the sooner someone shoots the bastard down, the better. anyone who tells you otherwise either wants to believe it (because a, they _use_ these silly schemes or b, it helps them believe we're not fucked) or is making money from it.

I think that most educated people can agree that planting a few trees and cycling to work is like pissing into the wind at this stage. I also read somewhere that the Earth is capable of repairing its own environment over time.

So why don't we all just carry on as normal, wait for the planet to go tits-up and then fix itself? Granted, it will probably take a few hundred thousand years, but then we'll all be long gone anyway, so what the hell?

As for the children? Well they're all a bunch of happy slapping, hoodie wearing borderline retards anyway, so screw them. We'll be doing the world a favour.

Posting anonymously to shield myself from the flames.

...but seriously, as mentioned above this really is pissing in the wind. And as for the theory of the world repairing itself, i wouldn't be so sure, i mean look at the sheer scale of what humans have done. This morning i sat in traffic on the M1 in belfast for 1hour. Thats only belfast, not exactly a metropolis on the world scale and yet the quantity of cars belching out shit was unreal.

I'm not some eco-warrior, i just see that we are doing proper environmental damage and that schemes like this really are just fucking useless PR, harnessing the green bandwagon.

Maybe skynet's terminators are eco-warriors. Human cull anyone?