forced to market green jellybeans

I don't want to be too much of a sourpuss, but it seems to me rather strange that companies like GE are finding green religion right around the time we are heading into oil and natural gas depletion.

I don't think this is a coincidence. Therefore, I am vastly unimpressed, and refuse to decant kudos for conservation and alternative energy technology that should have been undertaken fifteen years ago.

Via WorldChanging: Ecomagination: Inside GE's Power Play
GE also is pledging to improve its own environmental performance by (...) reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 1% by 2012 and the intensity of its greenhouse gas emissions 30% by 2008, both compared to 2004 (based on the company’s projected growth, GE says its emissions would have otherwise risen 40% by 2012 without further action)

Of course, we'll all be using less carbon based energy in 2012, there will be less around to burn. Being kicked in the jewels by depletion is the new green.

And the marketing has kicked into gear, by marketeers whose brains have likely been addled by an excess of mercury:

Via Mobjectivist, See Change
Straight out of a Michael Mann production, shown in what appears a glistening underground mine, the Ad-men prefer to glamorize the ugly past and ignore the equally ugly present.
Ignoring tank-top clad coal mining models, those who care refer non-euphemistically to the reality of the present-day coal industry as "Mountain Top Removal":

Probably the most nauseating species of commercial that evolved in the 1990's was the trope where the huge multinational whateverCo, (Oil, Finance, Military-Industrial) would brand the air and the brains of any viewers with pictures of a glistening, clean world filled full of sparkly toothed multi ethnic harmonized peeps, uplifting tunes whiffling in the backround and trees resonating greenly.

I think television has real promise for mind control.

I am glad GE is going to clean up part of their mess.