If you've flipped through a magazine or taken in an hour of evening news lately you've probably seen one of the many new ad campaigns from General Electric, BP, Ford, Exxon Mobil, and other blue chip companies trumpeting their ever-stronger environmental stewardship. “A whole lotta greenwashing,” you say? Not so fast.

True, there's a long history of industrial benemoths paying fancy ad shops to burnish their image with a faux-green sheen, but more and more these days, the ad campaigns reflect a real commitment to green corporate strategies, according to a recent article in The New York Times. Not all of them, of course (Exxon, for instance, appears to be doing little to lighten its Goliath-like environmental footprint).

But take the example of GE: Last May it launched its ambitious “ecomagination” campaign, which entails not only a high-style, big-budget ad campaign, but also a commitment to doubling funds for clean technology development to $1.5 billion annually. It also commits to reducing company-wide greenhouse-gas emissions by 1 percent and improving energy efficiency by 30 percent by 2012.

And look at BP – yes it's one of the biggest fossil fuel companies in the world, but it also just committed to investing $8 billion in alternative energy in the next decade. Of course that's peanuts compared to what it spends on fossil fuel development, but as the BP ad campaigns point out: “It's a start.”

Photo credit: www.ge.com/ecomagination