Greenpeace recently made headlines with its "Cool IT Challenge" in which it issued a scorecard about the green IT actions of top technology vendors such as IBM, Dell, Sun, Intel, and Cisco. Greenpeace concluded all of them were doing a poor job --- but it's Greenpeace itself, not the tech firms, that missed the boat. The Greenpeace campaign, while well-intentioned, is simplistic and misguided.

As GreenerComputing reported, Greenpeace found the tech industry "has plenty of room for improvement." IBM and Sun were listed as the best IT vendors for going green, but both scored a somewhat dismal 29 out of 100 on the scorecard.

There's nothing wrong with calling IT vendors to task for their work in Green IT. The problem is that the scorecard Greenpeace put together has little value and doesn't accurately reflect the companies' Green IT work.

Look at the scorecard itself. A full 35 points out of the 100 total are devoted to speeches and political advocacy done by the companies. But speeches and advocacy aren't the key to what these companies need to be doing. They need to be developing cutting-edge Green IT hardware, software, strategies, and consulting services. All the speeches in the world aren't as valuable as green hardware and consulting help.

The scorecard gives a maximum of 50 points for the climate solutions sold by the technology providers. But the scorecard doesn't actually delve into those solutions, and gauge how effective they are. About Dell, for example, the scorecard reads, "Provided only a limited number of climate solutions case studies and no evidence of assessment of net emission reductions relating to these solutions." Based on that, it gave Dell only a 2 out of 50

HP only got a 3, and Greenpeace noted that HP "Only provided information on impact of Halo teleconfrencing solution too late to be scored. Must make this public to be scored on this data. Needs to provide far more information on the net emissions reduction impact of solutions provided."

There was no mention, for example, that HP recently released a line of ProLiant G6 servers that according to HP deliver twice the performance of the previous generation of ProLiants while using only half the energy.

In fact, these kinds of details are entirely missing from the report. And these are the kinds of details that truly determine how green an IT vendor is. Greenpeace would do well to do its homework, instead of chasing publicity.