Apple CEO Steve Jobs took a big swipe at Greenpeace and two of its representatives attending Apple’s shareholder meeting this week saying: “I think your organization particularly depends too much on principle and not enough on fact,” Jobs said to the Greenpeace representatives. “You guys rate people based on what people say their plans are in the distant future, not what they are doing today. I think you put way too much weight on these glorified principles and way too little weight on science and engineering. It would be very helpful if your organization hired a few more engineers and actually entered into dialog with companies to find out what they are really doing and not just listen to all the flowery language when in reality most of them aren’t doing anything. That’s my opinion.”
Jobs has been unhappy about the way the Greenpeace measures the environmental commitments of manufacturing companies and Greenpeace has been digging at Apple recently. Specifically Greenpeace has had constant criticism of the iPod and Mac, which are usually at the bottom of its eco-friendly gadgets table. MacWorld notes that many observers anticipated that shareholders would criticize Apple about its environmental record but that criticism seemed to have largely been blunted by Jobs’ essay “A Greener Apple,” which was posted on Apple.com on April 4. Jobs also offered to help Greenpeace improve its measuring technology, saying that while Apple supported the idea of an environmental report card, it needed to be a real report card based on science. “Something that simple could go so far in our opinion,” said Jobs. “We are not going to set up a big infrastructure to engage environmental groups. We are real interested in getting the work done.” However Greenpeace has also welcomed changes being made at Apple to make it greener. Jobs admitted that Apple hadn’t always made it clear what the company’s environmental practices and goals were though he did publish an open letter in April trying to spell out the company’s goals. In part the letter said: “Apple has been criticized by some environmental organizations for not being a leader in removing toxic chemicals from its new products, and for not aggressively or properly recycling its old products. Upon investigating Apple’s current practices and progress towards these goals, I was surprised to learn that in many cases Apple is ahead of, or will soon be ahead of, most of its competitors in these areas. Whatever other improvements we need to make, it is certainly clear that we have failed to communicate the things that we are doing well.”
