Bluetech, Clean Tech, other green variants sound like Bull Tech

You can tell there’s a lot of green hype swirling through the airwaves. When oil and large industrial companies start billing themselves as green, it’s time to a hard look at what’s green and what isn’t. BP doesn’t stand for British Petroleum anymore. It means "Beyond Petroleum." A flower is its new emblem. Ahh, I see. GE, one of the worst polluters in American industrial history, has Ecomagination. And a snowball will freeze in hell when Exxon Mobil says it’s green.

The marketing of green is over us like low-hanging nuclear cloud. New green labels are popping up like spring flowers. Mercedes has its BLUETEC clean diesel technology. MIT renewables experts were calling it "Clean Tech" at a conference over the weekend. Sounds like BULLTECH to me.

Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe says innovators should apply the same principals and energy that gave rise to the Internet to creating clean and cheap energy, hence his vision for the "Enernet." The materials folks call the green movement "sustainability" which is one I like because it really has meaning. To the folks who make plastic, it means reuse. Oh yes, reuse is another term. So’s recycling. These terms actually stand for something.

Just suppose that some evidence really challenges the notion of global warming as a manmade problem (for the record, I believe it is). These gussied-up marketing terms will fly away faster than the swallows leaving San Juan Capistrano. Can anyone say South Beach diet?