By Mark Henricks

Before you invest in environmentally friendly IT in hopes of a public relations bonanza, better check the expiration date on whatever you’re buying. A recent Gallup survey indicates that American consumer interest in and concern about many environment issues is at a 20-year low.

The survey found that opportunities to save money -- rather than, say, fears of global warming -- drive decisions to recycle cans, and that most still don’t direct either purchases or protests based on a company’s environmental record.

That makes consumers a lot more like CIOs than, say, Greenpeace activists. A Gartner poll of global CIOs in January found no specifically green initiatives in their list of top 10-ranked technology priorities for 2010. On the business side of the ledger, however, reducing enterprise costs ranked second, behind only process improvement among top business priorities.

The latest Gartner findings dovetail with a survey it conducted almost a year earlier, in April 2009, that found big-company CIOs weren’t cutting funding for green initiatives -- but they were doing it to save money, not the planet. That poll found that European organizations were less likely than most to report maintaining green IT budgets, but the surveyors speculated that this was because, for European companies, going green was an established way of business that didn’t require a special budget.

The more recent Gallup consumer poll didn’t specifically address green IT. But it was still remarkable in that it showed during the past decade, while government, media, marketers and IT product and service vendors got increasingly worked up about the topic, the public’s interest has stayed level. For instance, Gallup found that in 2010 Americans are no more worried about global warming than they were in 2000, long before Al Gore received the Nobel Prize for “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Of course, global warming is a controversial and cloudy field, to some extent. Yet even in more user-friendly nooks of the environmental movement, such as recycling household waste, Americans claimed to be no better than they were 10 years ago. About 90 percent said they had recycled something, the same as in 2000.

Gallup’s other findings suggest that this isn’t going to change soon, even if the economy recovers. The pollsters speculated that the results mean that Americans who are going to be moved by environmental concerns are already doing whatever they are going to. Those who don’t care now, may never. And, with the environment dead last among seven public policy priorities the surveyors asked respondents to rank, going green may well have already reached and receded from its high-water mark as far as public opinion goes.

None of this means that green IT is about to go bad and be thrown out like spoiled fruit. However, it does suggest that, at least as far as public perception goes, it’s getting somewhat brown around the edges. That means justifying a green IT initiative is increasingly going to have to focus on cost savings, rather than image polishing.

Comments (4)

	1. 04-15-2010 11:55
	One of the big reasons many corporate IT organizations have held back on green IT investments is that it costs money to invest in green IT before companies can achieve energy cost savings. Perhaps green IT spending will improve a bit as the economy heats up. Registered

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	2. 04-15-2010 14:44
	The public\'s perception of anything the enterprise does continue to be balanced against the millions of jobs lost over the past few years. Unless and until corporations large and small bulk their workforce back up to \"full employment\" levels - ESPECIALLY with middle-class income jobs that can be performed by a high-school graduate with no other skill set - anything done to improve public relations will have near zero impact on the American consumer. Registered

Loel Larzelere

	3. 04-21-2010 23:51
	A recession always causes the general public to think more about how much they're paying for something, rather than how green is their purchase.    However, I don't think the green movement has lost its momentum, particularly in the IT industry. When you look at some of the advances that have been made in the data center business in the past year in particular - from virtualization through to climate controlled containers and even Google's move to become an energy trader - there is much to be optimistic about. Registered

Mel Duvall

	4. 04-24-2010 00:19
	I tend to agree with Mel, I see the movement as moving forward at a continued pace. The public sediment towards green technologies is irrelevant in this case as the end result is not intended for the end consumer as much as it intended to cut costs.     -sean Registered

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