The environment is making me sick. It’s all the hype and hypocrisy surrounding green ICT. Just try finding a vendor today that isn’t jumping on the green bandwagon.

Environmental awareness is laudable, but let’s be brutally honest: The driving goal in this industry is generating filthy lucre for shareholders, not environmental altruism. If these aims genuinely coincide, that’s dumb luck in action.

The latest buzz is that fiber infrastructure is good for the environment. No question that fiber is sexy right now, as my colleague Benoît Felten can attest on his Fiberevolution blog. But green too? That jibes with what I recall when my job was to procure fiber assets across Europe.

Sitting in remote fields, I know of regeneration sites for DWDM gear that make certain farmers in Baden-Wirttemberg more money than a whole herd of Friesians.

By law, these regens are camouflaged to protect the migratory habits of various birds. Effectively, fiber infrastructure is seen as a direct threat to natural roosting patterns. Shall we also talk about the environmental impact of running power and installing battery backup to such distant locations?

What about the kerfuffle surrounding the landing of yet more trans-Atlantic submarine cables? Namely, protecting the habitat of the sea pea, a rare herbacious perennial found in coastal Cornwall.

Of course, type of fiber right of way (RoW) makes a big difference in environmental terms. That’s why people are willing to pull on thigh-high wellingtons and venture into sewers, which offer a lower-impact fiber installation. Look at the UK’s H20 Networks or Hong Kong’s Towngas Telecom, which uses a glass-in-gas method.

But those approaches are largely for municipalities. Globally, 90% of fiber rollouts employ roads, rail and electricity RoWs. What’s the environmental impact? Get a fiber cut on an optical ground wire network and parts of the electricity grid must be shut down to fix it. I suppose that’s a way to save some CO2.

Vendors such as Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia Siemens sell low-power infrastructure, such as solar and wind-powered base stations. Low-power end-user devices are also available, like the PCs that Via Technologies is currently building in Brazil with Bitway Computadores. But are such initiatives actually about saving the environment or the fact that electricity in emerging markets like Brazil – if you can get it at all – is so damn expensive?

Don’t overstate the facts. Peddling a green message is trendy, but money, not the ozone layer, is what really closes the deal.