But there's a case to be made that not talking about what you're doing is a disservice -- not only to yourself as a company and to your employees and the other people who are pitching in, often against all odds, to get these things done -- but to society who may not see the bandwagon that's really taking place in the business world, and therefore not be able to get on that bandwagon and accelerate this transformation we're going through.  So I don't know.  I don't know how to definitively answer that except they're both big problems.

TH: Now, going back to your question, how good is good enough?  You also offer companies three questions or keys that they can use to help answer that question. What are they?  

JM: Well, very simply, these are of a high-level and came out of my own asking questions, a series of questions, to companies. When I boiled it down, they basically amounted to these three questions:  What do you know, what are you doing and what are you saying?        

So what do you know?  Do you really understand what your impacts are? Most companies don't, and when they look and figure it out, they're often surprised.  

So Coca-Cola a few years ago tried to figure out the carbon footprint of its operations. And you think about all that they're doing: Sourcing bottles and cans and aluminum, glass and plastic, and moving water, which is extremely energy intensive and transporting it all over the place from their nearly 1,000 bottling plants. And if you would actually count all the number of vehicles in the world that had the Coke logo on it, and assume that they were company-owned fleets, which isn't the case, they'd have the biggest fleet on the planet.  So what's the biggest part of their carbon footprint?

It's actually refrigeration. It's Coke machines: Coke machines and fountains in restaurants, and those refrigerators when you go into the 7-Eleven and they have the Coke-labeled refrigerators that's marketing equipment.  It's not just the energy use but it's actually the refrigerant that has intense greenhouse gas-building power.  

So what do you know?  Do you know that and until you really look at these things, you're often surprised at what you find.  

TH: And what's the second question?

JM: Well, what are you doing now that you know?  Do you have a plan?

And increasingly these days it's sort of a bold, audacious plan: zero waste or 100 percent renewably powered or carbon neutral. But even if it's not an absolute, all-or-nothing kind of goal, do you have a plan to move forward? A maybe two- or five- or 10-year plan that may never get you to perfection, but is it there, and is top management involved?  Is everybody else involved; are their paychecks in some way, or bonuses in part, dependent on how they perform?  

Are the suppliers and customers involved?  Is there a plan?  

And finally, once you know what you're doing and have a plan, what are you saying?  How are you talking about this?  Are you talking about it openly and authentically to everyone involved -- again, to suppliers, customers, employees, the media, the regulators and so on?  And not just waving your arm saying, "Hey ain't we green?" But actually, actually having an honest conversation.  

So, I maintain that companies that can demonstrate that they really understand their impacts, have a plan in place to do something about it and are talking about it openly and authentically, aren't necessarily good enough from a sense of this is all you need to do, but they're on solid footing on which to build environmental and make environmental claims and are far more insulated against charges of a greenwash.  

TH: So in terms of moving that needle forward, are we at the tipping point?  Is this just a trend?  

JM: I get those questions a lot.  People see all the action, all the stuff we report on GreenBiz.com everyday. It's easy to say, "Wow, this is really happening, we've reached the tipping point." And the fact is, we really haven't.  There's is a lot going on, but in terms of a lot of companies doing a lot of substantive things?  We're just not there yet. (We've) got a lot of companies doing a lot of things, but it's still kind of what I call random acts of greenness.  

It's just this assortment of different activities, and isn't necessarily coherent and cohesive and it isn't enough to really move the needle to really address the environmental challenges.  

In other words, if all companies were doing what the best companies are doing, would we really transform climate change and the water and energy challenges that we're going to be facing? I'm not so sure. So we've got a long way to go.

And then you asked, is it a trend?  Absolutely not.  This is a transformation of how business is being done.  I mean, think about it. Once companies wring out the carbon and waste and inefficiency and materials and energy embodied in all their products and operations, those aren't going to come back once oil prices were to drop to only $75 a barrel.  

This is the new way of doing business, and when you see the transformations taking place, and getting off of oil over the next couple of decades, and the new business opportunities that are coming out of that, and the new kinds of materials, and the new water efficient or closed-loop processes, and bio-mimicry, and the whole range of sort of cutting-edge technologies, we're not going to be going back to the way it used to be.  And so, green business and the green economy is really here to stay.  

Tilde Herrera is associate editor at GreenBiz.com.