The nonprofit Climate Counts organization, funded by organic yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm, has released its second annual scorecard rating companies’ efforts to combat climate change. While the organization reports solid gains across industries, one technology company stands out as a green laggard — Apple Inc.
Climate Counts rates companies on a scale of 0 to 100, using 22 criteria to determine if companies have measured their climate footprint, reduced their impact, supported policy change, and clearly disclosed their climate-related actions.
In the electronics field, IBM ranked highest with a score of 77 and Apple ranked lowest at 11. Apple, the scorecard found, posted no information on its efforts to measure its impact on global warming and has not supported climate-change legislation, though the company has made a few comments on its efforts to address global warming and has engaged the issue to some extent with employees and other companies.
Even so, Apple’s score this year was nine points higher than last year. The organization called Apple “A choice to avoid for the climate-conscious consumer. This company is not yet taking meaningful action on climate change.”
Credibility Issues for Jobs, Gore
While Apple has not been hurt by criticism of its environmental practices, the issue is likely to cause the company — and its most famous board member — significant pain, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group. “With [former Vice President] Al Gore on the board, this becomes a significant embarrassment, making him look disingenuous,” Enderle said. “Increasingly I expect folks to point that out, which will hurt Gore’s own [environmental] efforts.”
The situation also “erodes the Apple brand as people focus on this topic — and this topic is a popular one this year,” Enderle said. “It does seem inconsistent with [CEO] Steve Jobs’ Buddhist beliefs and makes him look hypocritical, which…
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