Why is Apple shunning the Climate Savers?

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative this week published its online catalogue of approved products. These comprised PCs, servers, motherboards, power supplies and other components that the group has certified as boasting high levels of energy efficiency.

The Climate Savers group has grabbed a fair amount of attention since it launched on 12 June this year and has become widely accepted as an influential and effective consortium committed to addressing the IT industry's overarching environmental problem – power.

In large part, this profile has been attained because of the number of IT companies that signed up and the calibre of the names involved in this project to drive energy efficient computing.

Overall, 130 companies and organisations have joined, including the world's biggest chip maker, Intel; the world's biggest software company, Microsoft; the world's biggest storage company, EMC; the most important IT company in history, IBM; the world's biggest open-source specialist, Red Hat; and the technology world's biggest newcomer, Google.

But one company was missing. You might call it the technology world's biggest icon – Apple.

Why? As part of an interview regarding the catalogue's launch, I asked that question to Erik Teetzel of Google, a Climate Savers spokesman.

"We've talked to Apple and I believe Apple's response is that energy efficiency and green computing [are important] but Apple does not do consortia, " Teetzel said.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Apple has joined many groups in the past, such as those for the PowerPC platform and HyperTransport I/O. Obviously it is just certain consortia that Apple does not do.

It seems very odd that a company that is arguably the defining symbol of Californian design and ingenuity would not wish to participate in a group like Climate Savers. Of course, a cynic might suggest it's the bashing the company has been receiving at the hands of Greenpeace over its use of hazardous components in its products that is behind its failure to join its counterparts in the Climate Savers group.

But either way, perhaps Mr Green himself, Al Gore, should be asking a few tough questions about Apple's shunning of green IT consortia when he attends his next board meeting.