The last few weeks have seen yet more examples of the same old same old:

--The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a coal industry-funded organization, launched an ad campaign featuring adorable lumps of coal singing variations on familliar holiday songs. Sample titles include "Deck the Halls (with Clean Coal)" and "Frosty the Coalman." A sample line: There must have been some magic in clean coal technology/For when they looked for pollutants there were nearly none to see. One little problem, though: many people view "clean coal" as an oxymoron. (Update: the ACCCE has now pulled this campaign. They were getting lots of grief about it ... only lumps of coal for reviews.)

--Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, the fourth-largest coal producer in the US, jumped the shark in a recent speech with comments like, "I don't believe climate change is real," "The greeniacs are taking over the world," and "Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid don't know what they're talking about, they're totally wrong. What they do is nonsense ... pretty simple, they're all crazy." Meanwhile his company's 2008 social responsibility report proclaimed its commitment to "address emissions issues, operations and facilities in the United States and abroad, as well as significant resources allocated to research ..." Writing in The Huffington Post, Kevin Grandia had a word for this: greenwashing.

--Last month, smack-dab in the middle of its highly-publicized Green Week, NBC laid off the entire staff of the Weather Channel's Forecast Earth, the only one of the station's programs that focused on climate change. Maybe it was just bad timing, but it exposed the Peacock to charges of being less than wholehearted in its commitment.

Does that make NBC's Green Week a scam? Not necessarily. Greenwashing is a complicated subject—and so is life inside companies. Sometimes the corporate left hand doesn't know what the corporate right hand's doing. Sometimes it does know but goes ahead anyway.

If you're inclined to view this as too gentle on corporations, you might want to re-consider. We all have competing impulses. We want to save money and we also want that fancy, spoil yourself vacation. We want to go fishing by ourselves and also spend time with our kids. Why should big ol' sprawling corporations be any different?

I've been tracking green marketing—and greenwashing—since the early 1990s, when I founded and wrote a newsletter called Green MarketAlert. Almost twenty years have passed since that very early chapter in green consumerism's history, yet things are in many ways the same. Some companies try to do their green advertising right, others feel drawn to test the edge—and a handul gallop far beyond it and are just plain outrageous.

Many companies are also still climbing the learning curve. It's not that it's taken them two decades to get the message, but that as green has gone more mainstream, more and more companies are needing to get educated. Scot Case, a vice-president with TerraChoice, an environmental marketing firm, says, "People who've been in this business for a while have learned that green marketing is really complicated. A lot of manufacturers are currently climbing that same learning curve. When they go astray, it's often not due to intentional misrepresentation but because they're still learning."

Another similarity is the continuing shortfall in guidance and enforcement. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued guidelines in the early 1990s, but they haven't been updated since, get this, 1998. That's ... last century! The guidelines, says Case, "are completely inadequate."

Earlier this year the FTC did hold hearings on environmental marketing, but no updates have been published yet. And even if its guidelines are made current, it doesn't have an enforcement budget. Which makes the guidelines toothless as well as outdated.

To fill the gap, TerraChoice has published an informal guidance document called The Six Sins of Greenwashing. On the off chance that you're about to commit greenwashing but are open to being saved, here they are:

Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off. Your claim might be true, but what did you give up to get that claim? Scott Case calls this a "Houdini trick—you focus everyone attention's on one aspect and hide the other stuff." Bully on you if you got your lumber from a sustainably harvested forest in Outer Marzbekistan … but what were the energy costs involved in transporting it from there?

Sin of No Proof. You make a claim but don't back it up. The best way to prove a claim? Formal product certification.

Sin of Vagueness. Six Sins cites garden insecticides promoted as "chemical-free" as an example. "In fact, nothing is free of chemicals. Water is a chemical. All plants, animals, and humans are made of chemicals as are all of our products … (W)atch for other popular vague green terms: “non-toxic”, “all-natural”, “environmentally-friendly”, and “earth-friendly.”

Sin of Irrelevance. The claim is true but meaningless. "No whales were harpooned in the making of this toilet."

Sin of the Lesser of Two Evils. Six Sins cites "organic tobacco" as an example. It's another Houdini trick. You shout "Lookee here!" because you're trying to draw attention away from something big and problematic.

Sin  of Fibbing. Also known as lying.

Although a useful document, The Six Sins of Greenwashing has its limitations. For one thing, you have to know about the document to use it, and it doesn't exactly have Gideon's Bible status in corporate marketing offices. Plus, it will only be sought out by marketers who'd rather not sin. Frankly, Scarlett, hard-core greenwashers won't give a damn.

Things have also changed, though, even as they've stayed the same. Most of all, the scale is vastly different now. As green has gone mainstream, green marketing has done the same--and so has greenwashing, its black-sheep cousin.

Our global environmental crisis has also intensified. Twenty years ago, people hadn't even heard the term "climate change." Now they're getting flooded by it.

The fat is in the fire now, and that makes it all the more important for green advertising to be consistently credible. Otherwise it will be considerably more difficult for purchasers to make knowledgable green choices, and this will have a dampening effect on consumers and producers alike.

At this point, it's pretty clear that next January will see the swearing-in of the first genuinely green Administration in our history. While the bulk of the media attention to date has been on Obama's support of clean tech and green jobs, a comprehensive Administration commitment would attend to the other important moving parts as well—and that includes green marketing.

Here's hoping the Obama Administration nudges the FTC to promptly issue updated environmental marketing guidelines with real teeth, and that it also gives the Commission the sort of enforcement budget that will let it put its money where its incisors are.