Comment

What does going green really mean?

Everyone's going green -- you can hardly have failed to notice. Green is the new addition to the armoury of the mega-corporation.

And all under the rubric of saving the planet -- though if you dig deep enough, it's more usually about saving the human race, which isn't quite the same thing -- lies the profit motive. Which is fine -- that's what companies are for.

But I digress.

This week's news that Brocade is playing the green card -- saying that its products have a smaller carbon footprint than those of arch-rival Cisco -- won't of course have blinded you to the fact that this is a very silly argument. It hasn't stopped the likes of IBM making much brouhaha about its championing of the green data centre -- whatever that is.

Pretty much every company now either wants to or does trumpet its new, smaller carbon footprint -- a phrase that would have prompted raised eyebrows of incomprehension of many people mere months ago.

But what does this phrase actually mean? Is it about actually producing less? Is it about reducing the amount of travel people do? Is it about cutting back in order to stem the inexorable march of capitalism towards ever higher profits and shareholder value?

No, it's usually about adding a green gloss to something the company's doing already, and ignoring the inconvenient fact that the organisations making the loudest green noises -- if I can put it that synaesthetic way -- are global corporations.

A moment's thought will suggest that there's nothing green about pulling rare metals out of the earth in remote locations such as Namibia or Siberia, shipping them to a foundry in the Far East, combining them with other rare stuff that's been shipped from an equally remote place, and transporting the resulting product halfway around the globe again.

That's before you start to calculate the energy consumption figures of the widget while in use, which seems to be the only consideration for the headline writers and marketing materials.

Hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius -- or Pius as it's become known to some as a result of the smug attitudes of some of its more high-profile, Hollywood domiciled owners -- are a good example.

And the whole phenomenon rests on the assumption that the 4.5 billion-year-old planet can't cope with what we humans are doing to it, despite the massive upheavals it's undergone and survived during its lifetime.

It seems that we never do learn from history.