'Green' Awards? Color Me Unimpressed

A parade of industries are hopping on the environmental bandwagon by concocting a "greeny," an award for strides in sustainability by one of their own.

Greenies -- like the one awarded for bottled water -- are about as meaningful as, let's say, an Oscar for the smallest Hollywood ego.

After all, how noteworthy is it to be the greenest company in a decidedly ungreen sector?

The latest of these awards came when the LA Auto Show and the Green Car Journal announced five nominees for Green Car of the Year. The judges enlisted give the award environmental cred. They include representatives of the Sierra Club, the Worldwatch Institute, the Ocean Futures Society and the World Resources Institute.

Still, I'm skeptical about its value. "Newness" was a big factor in picking the nominees, as was "the impact that a vehicle and its environmentally positive technologies are likely to have in the marketplace." Ron Cogan, editor and publisher of the Green Car Journal, says judges also looked for cars that boost the standards for environmental performance.

Those criteria seem awfully squishy, and the judges were even softer in applying them.

Most troubling about this wishy-washy award is the prospect of auto makers using it to make their company overall, and certain cars in particular, seem more environmentally beneficial than they really are. It provides a chance to blur the line between recognizing imperfect but valuable innovation and more corporate green-washing.

I'm disappointed in the outside judges -- none of them environmental pushovers -- for not holding out for more concrete progress and innovation when they cast their votes. It would have enabled the winner and the runners up to be more genuine than those red-carpet-tripping celebs when they declare that it's an honor just to be nominated.

All the nominees were hybrids -- a no-brainer in terms of public appeal and not as meaningful as car makers want you to believe when it comes to measuring a car's relative environmental impact.

The judges, moreover, recognized the value of hybrid technology last year, when they gave the award to the Camry hybrid from Toyota(TM) and the year before when they gave their inaugural award to the Mercury Mariner hybrid SUV from Ford(F).

Aside from the Chevy Tahoe, which puts a more sophisticated iteration of the hybrid motor into a passenger auto for the first time -- car geeks can read all about it on Edmunds Inside Line -- none of these other cars appear to be breaking any new technological ground or raising the bar for hybrid performance.

One nominee, the Altima hybrid from Nissan(NSANY) gets the best combined-city-and-highway miles-per-gallon of the bunch, according to the EPA, but in its class it's a distant No. 2 to the Prius (to be fair, almost everything that's a decent size is still a distant second to the Prius). And its combined miles-per-gallon is equal to the Camry hybrid. So if it won, the judges would be rewarding Nissan for holding the line, not pushing it.