Lately this blog has been featuring story after story about how big companies are trying to cash in on the public’s growing environmental awareness. We’ve discussed carbon-offsets, plug-in electric vehicles, agrifuels, and how big lumber companies want us to eat trees for dessert.

Well, today on Alternet I saw an outstanding article by Glenn Hurowitz about all of these so-called “green” initiatives and their destructive consequences. The article, originally from The American Prospect does about a good a job as possible connecting all of RAN’s issues around the unifying theme of corporate exploitation.

I think this is a very important lens for us. We need to be very careful when we listen to a corporation whose business is destroying the environment talk about “green” anything.

Too often corporations, with giant marketing budgets and few scruples, try to brand their own environmental destruction and social abuses as–somehow–part of the solution to things like global warming, rampant human rights abuses, and economic inequality.

The double speak is just unreal. As the article points out, they’ve actually convinced a lot of people, including members of the U.S. Congress, that burning down rainforests to generate electricity is a “green business.”

The only place the article falls short is in not connecting each of the industries mentioned (coal, agribusiness, logging, mining) with the one industry that makes it all possible: Global Finance.

Well, I guess that’s what RAN is for.