Greenpeace Down on Games Industry, Logic Flawed?

Earlier this week Greenpeace went after the games industry a bit, coming down on hardware manufacturers for poor environmental practices. Nintendo and Microsoft in particular got poor scores from the organization. Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs blog notes, though, that their methodology is a bit odd. It's not so much that Nintendo's environmental policies (say) are all that bad - they're just not readily available on a website. "The research in general appears lazy. Nintendo's failing grade appears to be based entirely on this entry in the corporate FAQ, which briefly summarizes some of the steps the company has taken to protect the environment. Anything that's not covered there is simply rated "No Information." Similarly, all of the information on Microsoft originates from press materials and corporate statements on the company's web site. Clearly, Greenpeace did not perform an exhaustive evaluation of chemical use through the manufacturing pipeline."

Comments

alternatives

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Saying something's bad is a lot easier than providing viable alternatives. After all, if you throw paint on fur, doesn't that just make the wearer (who obviously is not adverse to buying fur) have to go buy another one, thus propagating the industry more? It's much harder to legitimately convince them to wear something else.

Re:What a waste

[king-manic]

Meh, Greenpeace is a bunch of rich kids who like to gripe and love to trash anything thats popular, truth be damned.

I wonder if there is an "Environmentalists against Greenpeace" group? I would like to join. When I was taking an ecology course in University my prof always harped about how counterproductive green peace was. Not all ecological goal can be achieved by "Doing nothing to the environment". In some ecologies they are so out of whack that "culling" is indeed required but Green Peace isn't about preserving ecologies but about making headlines, making young activist feel good, and saving cute furry animals (in a short term near sighted way).

Sometimes they are doing good work, for instance when they disrupted Japanese "scientific" research into whales. However the majority of their activities are media friendly, poorly researched, publicity stunts.