Today being Earth Day, I had the pleasure (and/or annoyance) of having pretty much every e-mail in my inbox reference Earth Day in the subject line. Most of them were boring and standard ("Happy Earth Day," "Earth Day Resolutions," "Call Your Senator/Representative This Earth Day," or "It's Earth Day: Give Us Money!"), but one of them really stood out, and it was from one of my favorite daily newsletter senders: Urban Dictionary. Their tagline: "Green Greed."
Urban Dictionary defines Green Greed as "companies and people who don't care about the environment at all, except when it will make them money."
So that got me thinking: is green greed really that big of a problem? Sure, I won't pretend I'm not irked to see GM hopping on the green bandwagon (and making crazy money on it) after they spent 20 years convincing people to buy giant, unnecessary gas guzzling SUV's and after literally killing the electric car. But that fact of the matter is that with the help of GM, people will have more access to green transportation over the next few years then they would have if GM hadn't gotten on the bandwagon. At the end of the day, that's all that really matters right?
As I've said before, I do enjoy some things that aren't good for the environment, and it seems to me that the best way to make sure those things get greener, and the best way to make sure those greener versions get into the hands of ordinary 'Mericans, is to applaud green greed. That doesn't mean we need to forgive GM their sins, that we shouldn't take them to task for the problems they still have, or even that we need to be their #1 cheerleader. But as far as I am concerned, why companies go green is not nearly as important as that they do go green.
You know what -- I think that is my Earth Day resolution. To paraphrase the immortal Gordon Gekko: green greed is good -- just don't forget who you're dealing with.
