Greenpeace says Bill Gates Climate Leadership is not transferred to Microsoft, says Google is the Leader

Greenpeace is an organization which wants to drive changes.  In this blog post they start out pointing out Bill Gates Climate position.

Does Microsoft Do as Bill Gates Says on Climate?

Blogpost by Jodie - June 2, 2010 at 10:00 PMAdd comment

In January, Bill Gates published an argument about solving climate change titled “Why We Need Innovation, Not Just Insulation”. As you may have guessed, Gates’ point is that energy efficiency alone will not achieve us the emissions cuts scientists say are necessary to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Innovation, Gates says, is key to getting the bulk of emissions - those from transportation and electricity generation - down to zero.

The points out the inconsistency of how Microsoft performs as a company.  Bill is still Chairman of the Board.

Given the scope of the problem, combating climate change is going to require all of the above -- innovation, private and government sector investment, and regulation. Perhaps a more important question, then, given Gates' power and influence as the founder and current Board Chair of Microsoft, is whether he can influence the company to offer the innovative solutions needed to fight the climate crisis.

Is Gates putting his money where his mouth is?

We recently evaluated Microsoft on its climate leadership efforts and discovered that, even in the realm of innovation, Gates’ company has a way to go if it intends to meaningfully address climate change with technology. In fact, Microsoft receives only 31 points out of 100 on the latest version of the Cool IT Leaderboard.

Then they hit a pain point.

Thus far, Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, has failed to articulate the urgent need for government policy to drive a clean energy transformation. By comparison, Microsoft’s competitor, Google, is the top scoring Leaderboard company on advocacy for the clear position taken by its CEO, Eric Schmidt, in support of political action to drive transformative investment in clean energy technologies.

And close by stating a paradox.

If innovation and government encouragement are what IT pioneer, Gates, says will get us to zero emissions, shouldn’t an IT behemoth like Microsoft be demonstrating stronger leadership to get us there?

Watch out for the author Jodie if that is really their name.  This is the same author who scared the Uptime Symposium audience.

Greenpeace strikes fear in Uptime Symposium, continues No Coal Data Center efforts

I was talking to a friend who was at Uptime Symposium and he asked if  I heard that Greenpeace was there and Greenpeace asked Mike Manos a question in his CO2Kpresentation.  The fear in the crowd reached levels not typical as they knew they knew Greenpeace has target data centers as the IT polluters like the way Greenpeace has targeted Facebook, and no one knew Greenpeace was attending.  No sane data center event is going to promote that Greenpeace will be there.  See below for Greenpeace's latest move versus Dell.

He commented that the Greenpeace question to Mike was a softball question.  I told him of course, Mike is out there discussing issues Greenpeace supports.  They are not going to attack Mike.

Another friend send me a link to the Greenpeace blog post based on Uptime attendance.

Comments

[Business Electricity]

Great story, especially because a lot of organisations are looking at major prjects to save power and reduce their carbon footprint. Something as simple as energy-efficient lights often gets overlooked.