Going Green

Reading the cover features, Going Green, Mindset change needed to reap the benefits of green technology and Reducing our carbon footprint make a lot of sense, but something seems to be troubling my mind. I was wondering how those businesses and corporations involved in destructive use of the Earth state in their mission statements the efforts or steps they take to reduce the effects of their businesses on the environment, that will comply with internationally acceptable standards of carbon footprint reduction or staving off the effects on global warming. Generally all companies and corporations exist to make money and to give profit to its shareholders, based on an ongoing concern and increasing profitability. Based on such a world wide business premise, for example:

• How would a Timber company reconcile the need for continuous and sustained profits with sustainable practices? We know in Malaysia, it is a foregone fact that annual concessions of virgin forests (sometimes from a part of the forest reserve) are applied for by companies, and often approved by various State governments, for the extraction of valuable hardwood. The companies, whose core business is timber extraction, need regular infusions of new forest lands so that its profits can be maintained. Replanted forests do not have the kind of wood that virgin forests produce, and anyway, replanted forests are unable to fulfill the voracious demand for hardwood only found in our forests in Borneo. I wonder if these companies can ever be classified as companies that will comply as "Green" companies, if one day we wake up suddenly to the fact that we do not have any forests left?
  
• Similarly companies in the Americas and elsewhere that destructively mine for copper, aluminum, diamond, etc. To be successful ongoing concerns providing sustained profit streams to its shareholders, these companies must necessarily destroy more land, and often have to evict natives from the spot as those poor denizens are sitting on literally pots and pots of gold. Again, my question. How will these companies ever meet with the criteria to be called "green"

Or, do we practise double standards? Allow "destructive" companies to carry on, because we don't what to do otherwise? If so, what is the point of talking about "going green" then? :-(