Worth Civils follows up on this morning’s New York Times report about a new system for measuring corporate carbon footprints:

A new group is giving consumers a way to evaluate the companies whose products they buy based on their commitment to fighting climate change. The takeaway: There is a lot of room for improvement.

A nonprofit group called Climate Counts has come out with a new ranking of 56 companies divided into eight sectors. Each company was assigned a score on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 meaning the company is perfectly committed to fighting global warming. The highest-scoring of all companies was camera maker Canon (part of the “electronics” group), with a score of 77. Second in the electronics group was IBM, with a score of 70. In the apparel group, shoe company Nike topped the list with a 73. Leading the food-products group was Unilever, which makes Dove soap and Lipton teas, with a score of 71. These were the only four companies to score 70 or higher.

After that, the scores dropped off dramatically. General Electric, which owns NBC (and could some day own part of WSJ.com parent company Dow Jones), led the list of media companies with a 61, followed by News Corp. (which could also some day own Dow Jones) at 57. Procter & Gamble headed up the list of household product names with a 53, and SAB Miller was the top beverage company with a 48. Rounding out the sector leaders was Starbucks, leading food services with a 46 score, and Yahoo, leading Internet and software firms with a 36.

Several well-known companies barely registered in the Climate Counts rankings. Fast food operators did especially poorly, with Taco Bell and Pizza Hut parent Yum Brands only scoring 1 point and Burger King and Wendy’s not getting any. Sara Lee only got 2 points, as did Apple. Google scored 17, but eBay and Amazon.com had a 2 and 0, respectively. Splitting up didn’t seem to help Viacom, which got 3 points, and CBS, which didn’t get any.

The companies were scored by Climate Counts based on 22 criteria that, broadly, gauge: whether they measure their carbon footprint; what efforts they have made to reduce their own climate impact; whether they support or oppose global-warming legislation; and what they disclose to the public about their work to address climate change.

“Business must play a significant role in stopping global warming, and we believe the key to influencing companies lies in the hands of the consumer,” Gary Hirschberg, CEO of yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm, which scored a 63 and has built its brand around health and the environment, said in a statement. Hirschberg is chairman of Climate Counts and helped come up with the rankings.

But some companies complained to the New York Times that the rankings were arbitrary and didn’t accurately reflect their efforts to help the environment. Looks like another job for the Numbers Guy

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