How do the heavy weights of the Internet and telecom stack up in terms of how green their technology, energy consumption and political advocacy are? On Tuesday night Greenpeace released its latest Cool IT leaderboard report, which ranks the world’s largest IT giants, and shows who’s making progress and who’s falling behind.
Greenpeace gave Google the top overall score (53 out of 100), while Cisco (49 out of 100), Ericsson (48 out of 100) and Fujitsu (48 out of 100) followed shortly behind. On the flipside of the top companies, were the stragglers, which included Oracle (10 out of 100) at the very bottom, and TCS (11 out of 100) and Telefonica (11 out of 100) at the second and third to last spots.
Greenpeace gives the most weight in its scores to companies for using their own technology to reduce the world’s green house emissions. For example, a networking company like Cisco develops smart grid technology which can save energy and reduce emissions. The second largest part of the Greenpeace score is made up by how well the company advocates publicly and politically for reducing emissions. Lastly, Greenpeace gives companies points for monitoring and managing their own company emissions footprint.
Google rose in the rankings from six overall in 2010 to number one this week. Last year Google invested close to a billion dollars into clean energy projects. Cisco lost its top spot in 2010 to Google this year.
IBM, which was 3rd in 2010, dropped to 9th overall this week. Greenpeace says that IBM fell across all three categories and obtained four penalty points in political advocacy for being a member of a trade association that is trying to block the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals.
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