“Sorry Mr. Jobs, but man from Greenpleaze give me big money to be photo in!”

Greenpeace attempted to smear Apple with a “goofy Photoshop treatments of the company’s marketing materials” (Digital Daily). In typicalGreenpeace fashion, they over-reached.

According to the WSJ’s Digital Daily:

…Greenpeace, which didn’t even bother to actually measure toxins in Apple’s products. According to the Statistical Assessment Service, Greenpeace used Apple’s labeling to determine which chemicals are present in its products and then used the precautionary principle for those chemicals’ toxicity to calculate its green score. “In other words,” explains STATS, “if a study has shown that a chemical causes some damage in rodents, the precautionary principle dictates that one must assume the chemical is a risk to humans, no matter what the quantity, or the likelihood of actual exposure, or the mode of action, or the weight of countervailing evidence. If we applied the precautionary principle to vegetables as Greenpeace does to computers, we’d have to ban tomatoes and lettuce, as the naturally occurring caffeic acid is a carcinogen in rodents at high quantities.”

Nice, eh? It get’s better. According to the EPA’s Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, Apple’s products are among the most environmentally friendly in the PC world. Which is not to say that the EPEAT is the best gauge of green standards, just that there exist data points that don’t support Greenpeace’s accusations against Apple. Anyway … green tech is obviously an important issue, and it’s wonderful to see Apple make a public commitment to environmental action like this–regardless of its inspiration.

On their web site, Greenpeace claimed victory of course–even for initiatives already underway.

We are cheering! Steve Jobs has decided to bring us closer to the greener apple that Mac users all over the world have been asking for.

Today we saw something we’ve all been waiting for: the words “A Greener Apple” on the front page of Apple’s site, with a message from Steve Jobs saying “Today we’re changing our policy.”

But this is hardly a victory:

It’s easy to dismiss Greenpeace’s campaign as a cheap, self-serving publicity stunt, but it’s a stunt that has succeeded, if you look at the massive and largely uncritical media coverage. And none of the news reports critically examined the scientific basis for Greenpeace’s claims, the methodology of its ranking – or the ethics of accusing a company of being an environmental polluter without providing actual proof that there is real exposure and real harm. Apple deserves better – and so do we.

I’d love to hear Apple board member Al Gore’s take.

More at ITWire.

The point isn’t that Greenpeace shouldn’t be allowed to try and get companies to clean up their acts. It’s that they should do so with more transparency with regard to the science behind their claims and rankings. Having gas-powered blow up green apples at MacWorld conventions is just a cheesey stunt and their mocked up Apple site isn’t much better. They can’t expect a to have such a compliant media reception every time they do this.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 7:34 pm by Insider and is filed under Politically Correct ... and stupid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.