It's Efficient, but for Whom?

One big problem with the "green" (environmentalism, efficiency, social consciousness) movement is that it is hard to know the truth about what is green. Hence the term "greenwashing" as in flubbing or lying about the greenness of one's product, company, or service. But is lying necessarily bad here? It could be.

It's the case in business and life that things can be "efficient" (defined by Answers.com as "Acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort.") for one person but not another. In fact, that's the norm; there are system effects to improving one area of a process while not considering the others. There has to be a balance since there are many stakeholders and perspectives for anything we look at or touch. A simple example of sub-optimized efficiency is a company that dumps its waste into a local water supply, saving itself money but breaking the law and damaging the water supply. It's efficient for them but inefficient for the water supply, water users, etc.

Say things change and this same company decides to change its behavior and "go green". They promote how they reduced X, Y, and Z. This is good. All positive change is good, but it's still not enough. The company is not off the hook now for doing ONE GOOD THING!

The point here is that there are many SHADES of GREEN. Anything that is positive for people or the planet can be considered green but we have to be very careful what we call green or call good enough. What we should be shooting for is A BRIGHT GREEN THAT WE CAN MEASURE. That said, there's usually a the competing force of financial and economic greed. We can and do measure that well: it's called profit or loss. Where's the balance in a system like this? How would we know if we were doing the right thing? What if I made $1M from a business that hurt things and then reinvested that in saving children or streams? Am I bad?