For Greenpeace, 'Cool IT' means sensitivity to climate change, and Cisco is now tops

I know some of my colleagues have an issue with Greenpeace's scare tactics on the environment, but you've got to admit that they are also really effective at getting big companies to pay attention to certain issues -- such as the potential of technology to counteract climate change or reshape energy use.

One of the ways it does this is with its Cool IT Leaderboard, below. The leaderboard keeps tabs on three primary things: how a company's products contribute to the greater cause of addressing climate change, how the company itself its dealing with its carbon footprint and setting greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets, and what it is doing to advocated politically and (in another sense) from a standards perspective.

As you can see, Cisco has managed to make it to the top of the list -- with a score that is almost double that of its last showing. Greenpeace cites Cisco' work on smart grid technology and policy, as well as its focus on addressing energy consumption. To refresh your memory, Cisco has two very public initiatives here: EnergyWise, which is a management system for managing the power consumption profile of virtually anything attached to a network, and Mediator, which is a monitoring device that loads up the energy profiles of various devices in your data center or office building.

Other companies that do well include Google, because of its PowerMeter technology (although it gets dinged on its internal policies). Ericsson and Fujitsu were recognized for the methodologies they have embedded into their products in order to measure the impact of their technologies.

And the big question I have is: Where's Apple?