The Green PR wars are escalating and the latest report from Climate Counts is covered by the NYTimes.
Craig Berman, a spokesman for Amazon.com — which scored 5 this year, up from zero in 2007 — also shrugged off the scores. He noted that Amazon had made “significant progress” in reducing packaging and otherwise reducing its carbon footprint.
Companies that showed marked improvement were far more exuberant. Google, which has pledged to become carbon neutral, rose by 38 points, to 55. “Projects that had been years in the making came to fruition,” said Bill Weihl, Google’s green energy czar.
The NYTimes article makes no mention of Yahoo or Microsoft. This interesting that Google gets better scores than Yahoo, even though Yahoo has achieved carbon neutrality for 2007 by buying carbon credits. Yahoo scores 37. The Yahoo green staff have got to be pissed.
Microsoft employee, Lewis Curtis, blogs a response to the NYtimes article.
Today, in the New York Times, the Climate Counts group gave an impressive rating to Google 55 while rating Microsoft at a 38. They quoted Google's commitment to go carbon neutral.
Google is a heavy user for energy and all of their green token projects have been tiny. I predict they have spent more money marketing their green projects than the actual projects themselves.
Also, if they have a commitment to be carbon neutral, why don't they release their real carbon footprint numbers? in the spirit of openness and "do no evil", why don't they disclose the real progress or allow the public to tour their centers to see the real work being done to improve environmental impact?
Apple was given a very low rating of 11. I think it's comical in the interview with the New York Times, Apple blamed much of their carbon footprint on their users.
So let talk about Microsoft:
Microsoft is one of the only massive web solutions companies that allows customers to tour their datacenters to see the real environmental improvements to increase efficiency and decrease environmental impact.
From presentations from Microsoft's datacenter team to the public, it's explained how we measure and how granular we measure and what specific steps Microsoft takes. I've worked for many large tech giants and at this point, I haven't seen a more open model to the public.
also:
Microsoft as developed the most aggressive power saving features in the world for client and server computers. There are significant power savings capabilities for consumers and administrators to control to reduce energy consumption of their operating system experience.
Microsoft's .Net platform has capabilities for developers to write power aware applications in WPF (windows presentation foundation) to reduce power drain on client systems.
In the last couple of years,(many would be surprised) Microsoft now offers some of the most consolidation infrastructure options to reduce the number of servers and clients in an IT organization.
Microsoft invests significant amounts of money into the Microsoft Research group to design solutions for consumers and corporations reduce environmental impact.
Microsoft offers some of the most pervasive remote worker solutions in the world.
Microsoft has invested significantly in websites, concerts and public campaigns to help consumers learn how to reduce environmental impact (much of it not relating to our product line).
In reality, it's easy to see how critics can pick apart organizations through their narrow lens. I predict that we will see more of these models in the future. But, I hope the environmental sustainability market matures to a better state than this.