Environmental group Greenpeace regularly rates corporations on how environmentally friendly their products are. Instead of encouraging the practices of green companies, these ratings are more often used to publicize their competitors' poor policies. Perhaps the best-known such slam is against Apple, and Greenpeace recently issued a warning against a company Apple is often compared with: Nintendo.

Though Greenpeace says Nintendo's response to their score is "pretty lame", what I think is truly lame is the reason for the negative score: not lack of compliance, but lack of information. It is true that Nintendo was given several opportunities to provide Greenpeace with the information needed to assess its greenness, and that Nintendo for whatever reason chose not to. But, with little to judge them by, Greenpeace nonetheless ranked Nintendo, issuing as low a default score as possible,

That's a rather heavy-handed approach to earning a company's cooperation. But then, when has Greenpeace, for all its laudable intentions and goals, ever been accused of playing well with others? We already know that the Wii has lower power consumption than any other current-gen console. Did Greenpeace ignore this fact because it was not confirmed by Nintendo? Or were they assessing only the materials used in console production? Even Sony, which topped their rankings, gets picked on in this amusing video:

With millions of consoles being manufactured every year, ensuring a minimal environmental impact is essential. Putting a bad rap on companies that have not been confirmed to be environmentally irresponsible puts the blame on scapegoats instead of actual polluters. It's time Greenpeace amended their ranking methodology and focused on the actual villains.