Apple is the kind of marketing machine that will be discussed in business classes for decades to come. It is a mega-giant corporation that makes its young, progressive users feel individualistic and rebellious. Its chairman, Steve Jobs, gives almost no money to charity, was caught illegally obtaining stock options (yet got no penalty) and controls what you can put on Apple tools but is fondly regarded as a man of the people while Microsoft chairman Bill Gates donates billions and is reviled as a monopolist even though people can install Flash or anything they want on their PCs.
Greenpeace is not buying the hype - they have listed Apple as the worst of technology companies because of its heavy reliance on "dirty" data centers, namely those that use coal for power. Well, what can Apple do? Greenpeace is trying to make some noise for Earth Day but the solution for Apple is to either go into the energy generation business - and using green energy with today's technology would make iPads costs $2,000 each - or build their data centers overseas, which means even more jobs lost in a bad economy.
Greenpeace does not really know how much coal Apple is using, of course, but they guesstimate. And that is good enough for anyone still giving money to Greenpeace. They claim dependence on coal for Apple's data centers is 54.5% while Facebook is 53.2%, IBM 51.6%, HP is 49.4%, and Twitter is 42.5%.
But IT is actually pretty efficient.
Jonathan Koomey, a project scientist for the End-Use Forecasting Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whose work was cited in the study, said that the IT industry wrongly attracted criticism: "The use of IT often reduces environmental impacts. When we compared greenhouse gas emissions for downloading music to buying it on a CD, for example, we found downloads reduced emissions 40-80%."
Greenpeace never made a nickel claiming things are actually pretty good, no matter how many improvements have been made, but it's hard to pick a good guy between them and a Big Brother company like Apple, which has been busted (along with the other darling of forward-thinking fans, Google) for unethically transmitting user locations back to The Hive without permission and storing it. Why would they need to store that data? No good reason, that is certain, but on the energy issue, Apple wins. Because Greenpeace doesn't care about keeping Americans employed and they did their part to run nuclear out of the country, so coal is what we have.
