Except for one keynote speech he gave on Sept. 9, Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs has shunned the press since he went on medical leave in January. But Jobs spoke with BusinessWeek on Sept. 22 about a subject that has nothing to do with the Mac, iPods, or iPhones.
The topic was Apple’s reputation with regard to the environment and its effort to reposition itself as a leader instead of a laggard. While environmentalists tend to focus on carbon emissions from corporate operations and companies’ publicly stated goals to do better, Jobs says Apple wants to set the pace in addressing what he says is a bigger challenge: reducing the amount of power required to run the company’s products. “Unfortunately, we’re way ahead of our competitors,” Jobs contends.
Until recently, Apple did little to back up this argument other than to say “trust us.” That didn’t sit well with organizations that urge companies to engage in public debate over global warming or appoint executives or board members to push a green agenda. Apple almost never takes a position on public-policy questions, and few Apple staffers speak or even attend industry conferences. So it’s not surprising that Apple scores poorly in rankings. “We tend to report rather than predict,” says Jobs. “You won’t see us out there saying what the PC is going to look like in 2016. We quietly go try to invent the PC for 2016.”
A New Way to Gauge Carbon Footprints
But now, Jobs thinks the time is right to report on what Apple has accomplished. The company has finished a multiyear data-mining project to fully understand its environmental impact on the planet and has published data that may stir up controversy. Apple takes issue with studies that hand accolades to rivals such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard for cutting emissions at…