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 [1], BP [2], Ford [3], Exxon Mobil [3], and other blue chip companies trumpeting their ever-stronger environmental stewardship. “A whole lotta greenwashing [3],” 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 [4], according to a recent article in The New York Times [4]. 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 [5], 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 [6] 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 [7]