"Green Fatigue" Setting In

Over the past couple of years every damn company on the planet has advertised itself as "green". This includes giant oil companies (especially BP), power companies that burn coal, and every consumer electronics company in world (they forget to tell consumers that manufacturing semiconductors and flat panels requires everything in the periodic table from arsenic to xenon).

I've been rolling my eyes at all of this. But if Samsung can make a chardonnay-sipping tree hugger feel good about plugging in his 50" wide-screen TV to the coal-fired power grid, I'm okay with that (that's what marketing is all about).

But everyone outside the Sierra Club is starting to see through the smoke and mirrors:

“Energy Pulse 2007,” a study released in October by The Shelton Group, Knoxville, Tenn., reveals a significant, measurable downturn in purchase intent for a range of green home products, as well as rising skepticism about advertisers’ use of terms like “green,” “sustainable,” “earth,” and “eco-friendly.”

Like everything else in the consumer area, the corporations bludgeoned the term, making it as meaningless as "new and improved".