Greenpeace has provided proof again of the short-sigthtedness, and narrow-mindedness, of environmental organizations, most of which are driven by a kind of religious fervour, rather than common sense.

According to Greenpeace’s green league tables, Apple ranks at the bottom for its alleged reliance on “dirty” coal-powered data centres.

That coal is a major source of pollution is not in dispute. Nor is the need to find cleaner ways of generating power. Apple, like most tech companies, maintains data servers that gobble up a lot of power. In the US, a lot of the power needs are still met by means of coal-fired power plants.

It’s not that those companies insist on using coal; data centres, due to their size, can’t be set up just about anywhere, and once a location is found, one must do with the power source that’s available in the area.

Some companies are actively looking for locations with a moderate climate in order to keep the cooling requirements for servers to a minimum. Others, such as the host of this site, are fortunate enough to be able to access wind power for their servers.

In Apple’s case, surely no one can think that Steve Jobs is out to deliberately pollute the world, a move that would seriously clash with his general philosophy, being the kind of guy who’s probably made several and regular personal donations to environmental organizations and related causes. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world yet where non-polluting sources of energy are widely available everywhere, so companies, including Apple, must use what’s in place now and hope for a cleaner future.

The Greenpeace league table, however, is inaccurate, because it looks at only factor, but fails to award offsetting points for other things these companies do to help the environment.

Take Apple’s iPad. Thanks to this tablet, more and more people are switching away from paper products and now consume newspapers, magazines or books without ever killing a single tree. By “going tablet” in this way, iPad users don’t only save trees, but also reduce gasoline consumption: newspapers, for example, don’t have to be delivered by car anymore, because the subscriber gets the newspapers loaded onto his or her iPad automatically every day.

One app for the iPad, the PressReader, had saved over 100,000 trees by August of last year. And this is the accomplishment of just one app. Imagine the combined contributions to the forests of the world made by all the apps that serve up newspapers, magazines and books.

Apple has also made giant leaps in battery development as well. While PC laptops still need to be recharged and/or powered up every three hours or so, Macbooks can easily run on battery power alone throughout the regular working hours of any given day, thus reducing energy consumption quite substantially. The iPad, too, can last around eleven hours before its battery has to be recharged (a process that takes just around four hours).

But even when those machines are hooked up to the power mains, Apple devices consume a lot less power than a Windows-based PC, because the Windows operating system is much more power-hungry than even the biggest iMac (which also happens to be the reason why PC laptops don’t last long on battery power – anyone who runs Windows on a Macbook knows that it consumes a lot of power, and fast).

It goes without saying that dirty coal plants should be phased out where possible, or at least be replaced by clean coal technology. But placing Apple at the bottom end of such a green league table is unfair and inaccurate, for when the other environmental contributions are factored in, the company doesn’t appear as “dirty” as Greenpeace makes it out to be.

But that’s the problem with such groups or organizations that pursue a single-track approach and, thus, fail to see the bigger picture (presumably, the drafters of the league table may not even be aware of the environmental benefits, say, of the iPad described in this column).

It is this kind of blinkered view that keeps putting people off environmental groups and causes. If groups like Greenpeace applied more fairness and common sense in its public pronouncements, people would be more inclined to listen and, perhaps, change some of their polluting ways more readily than they do now.