Many people don't think so, and American satirist and commentator Steven Colbert agrees, particularly in his recent video on oil industry greenwashing.

In one 3.5 minute vignette, Colbert rips a new one for Exxon Mobil (spouting about its lithium battery technology), Valero Energy (promoting clean fuel) and Chevron, whose message is so spun nobody knows what it is trying to say.  

Colbert's imaginary target in this delightful spoof of oil company ads is a company named Prescott Oil, undoubtedly named after President George Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, who was tied to oil through John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, and has more recently been implicated as a Hitler supporter.

Spoof aside, greenwashing is a perverted form of marketing that turns integrity and good sense on its head by suggesting that products known to harm the environment are actually good for it. Many corporations are guilty of greenwashing, from cosmetic companies touting their ecofriendly products (made with phthalates) to DuPont's former sales slogan, Better Living Through Chemistry (like that's ever really going to happen!).

Greenwashing, when used by the energy industry, is so patently absurd it borders on the ridiculous, which is apparently the point Colbert is trying to make. As NewScientist observes, our efforts to be environmentally conscious are futile as long as our entire economic system is built on a lie. That lie is oil.

This year, the oil industry will spend $1 billion in advertising to promote oil, coal and natural gas. That's beaucoup bucks that could be better spent funding alternative energy ventures.

Exxon says it does, and has in fact invested $325 million in a lithium battery company. Before you gasp in surprise, remember that Exxon made $40.6 billion in 2007 alone. That's net profit, or take-home pay. A year before, retiring CEO Lee Raymond's parting gift from the company was $400 million. Makes the lithium battery investment seem like pretty small potatoes, doesn't it?

It isn't solely an American problem. Big Oil is multinational. Due north of the U.S., Alberta's government is spending $25 million to greenwash Athabascan oil sands. If ever there was a project that needed a little green, this would be it. Unfortunately Alberta's efforts don't disguise the real truth; oil sands recovery is an environmental disaster, driving Mother Nature into a corner and local economies into a frenzy. A used, doublewide trailer costs $200,000, if you can find one in Ft. McMurray. When the oil is extracted, and the resource played out, these small communities and First Nation enclaves will be dirty, polluted, barren and deserted as jobs follow the money elsewhere. The locals will be left with cancer, sick children, polluted water and a raft of debt generated in boom times.

Coal's story isn't any cleaner. In spite of five years of hype, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has pulled the plug on Bush's FutureGen "clean coal" plant in Illinois, citing costs that kept on rising before the goal was even in sight. According to David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental action group, the project always was, "too much future, too little gen".

Clean coal seems to be one of those persistent urban myths, and experts on the project were known to refer to the project as NeverGen. The fact is that current technology can't make coal ‘cleaner'. Some say cap and trade protocols, combined with mandatory, scheduled emissions reductions will rescue coal. I suspect this is wishful thinking, based on the fact that America's most abundant energy resource is coal. It would be nice if our energy-problem solution were right in our backyard, but it isn't, and wishing won't make it so.    

Nor is carbon sequestration, a field still in its infancy, likely to come to the rescue. Carbon sequestration is imperfect, expensive and intricate. As the University of Manitoba's Vaclav Smil notes, sequestering just 10 percent of today's carbon dioxide emissions would require more infrastructure than is currently being used worldwide to garner oil.

Yet the industry forges ahead. A workshop under the combined aegis' of the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, or CSLF, was held in Calgary, Alberta in the late fall of 2007, and issued a one-page report stating that, in order to move forward with clean coal and coal-to-liquid technologies:  "Twenty full-scale plants each storing more than a million tonnes per year of CO2 need to be operating by 2020 worldwide."

That's not going to happen, either. The world's economies are reeling. This time around, it may be best to throw out the baby with the bathwater and look for more eco-friendly solutions to our power needs. If the current American recession has cut fuel consumption by about 10 percent, and industrial output has cut into fuel needs by another 2.8 percent, America and other industrialized nations now have the breathing room they need to begin retrofitting economies to run on clean energy.

Further Reading:

• The Coal Industry's Ace in the Hole
• Tar Sands: The Sub-prime Lending Disaster of the Oil Industry
• Energy at the Crossroads
• What's In a Name? Consumer Reports Outs Front Groups
• Learning About Exxon Through Advertising
• The Carbon Capture Juggernaut Rolls On