This Financial Times editorial on the political fallout of the BP oil spill starts off by making a few good points--acknowledging that BP has made mistakes, calling for the company to reimburse those who have suffered economic damages--before suggesting that the real culprit is not BP but the U.S. regulatory system.

It's not that I disagree with the FT's assertion that "the U.S. has not developed an adequate safety regime" for offshore exploration and drilling, or with it's claim that the agency responsible has "performed lamentably," or with the idea that "there are better regulatory systems the U.S. could emulate."

But the FT seems to believe the U.S. regulatory system developed in a vacuum, that there's a point at which the culpability of BP and the oil industry ends and the culpability of the regulatory system takes over. But the reality is that the oil companies had a major role to play in the development of that regulatory system and that they are as much to blame for the failure of the regulatory system as they are for the failure of the technology.

(As an aside, this is why I find the claims that this is "Obama's Katrina" entirely unconvincing; the current situation is a direct result of the previous administration's attitude toward regulation--this is Bush's disaster, perhaps more than Katrina was.)

The broader point here is that companies and industries should be held accountable for the negative consequences of their policy influence.

If patients are injured by the side-effects of a pharmaceutical product after the company lobbied for looser regulation, then the company should be held accountable. If customers are poisoned by meat producers after those producers argued for less strenuous inspectors, then we should ensure that full responsibility falls on those producers. If an oil rig spews toxic substances into the oceans after oil producers lobby for less stringent safety measures, then those companies should be blamed when the safety measures fail.

I would suggest a simple formula. When activists propose a piece of regulation, companies invariably argue that (a) it's not necessary and (b) it's too onerously expensive. If regulators take the companies at their word when it comes to (a) then the companies should be prepared to put their money where their mouth is by agreeing to pay--without any costly litigation--a fine that is, for example, double the amount quoted in (b) as an argument against regulation

Newsweek's Weston Kosova examines "greenwashing" in an article about the gap between how companies scored on its new Green Rankings list--which factors in environmental impact, policies and performance--and how they scored when it comes to green reputation, based on a survey of CEOs, CSR professionals, academics and environmental experts.

"Sometimes a good ad campaign does a better job of enhancing a company's green reputation than going through the expense and hassle of adopting actual environmentally sound practices," says Kosova, citing a Chevron ad campaign. "You might think that if Chevron was really worried about problems like global warming, they would spend some of those PR dollars lobbying Congress to adopt stricter gas mileage requirements for automobiles. They do not do this. Instead, I'm apparently supposed to praise them as environmental heroes because they tell me to unplug my toaster and think about getting a Prius.

"Yet ad campaigns like these work. Chevron lands at No. 371 out of 500 companies on Newsweek's green rankings. But it claims the No. 62 spot when it comes to green reputation thanks in part to those pretty, polished ads."

I'm not sure the ad campaign is "working." If a company's green reputation is significantly better than its green performance, I wouldn't call that a public relations success; I'd call it a public relations problem.

Particularly in the social media age, any gap between a company's advertising and marketing activity and its actual performance will almost certainly be exposed--probably sooner rather than later. And when it is, if people believe they have been misled, the damage to the company reputation, its credibility and its stakeholder relationships will be severe.

Companies whose reputation is better than the underlying reality would do well to rein in their communications.

I just received an e-mail press release castigating Levi Strauss & Co. for withdrawing from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the organization's increasingly untenable stance on climate change. (I believe the Chamber's official position is that if we close our eyes and stick out fingers in our ears, the science of climate change will simply go away.)

Anyway, the release was issued on behalf of junkscience.com (at least they're up-front about what they're peddling), which is part of Steve Milloy's hugely impressive empire of ignorance. It provides considerable detail on the amount of CO2 that is involved in manufacturing a pair of jeans, the company's water and energy use, and concludes with impeccable logic: "if Levi Strauss were really concerned about CO2 levels, it would also go out of business."

"To help Levi Strauss save the planet, then, the answer is clear: we should go naked and it should go broke," says Milloy.

Well, that's one possible answer I suppose. Alternately, we could stop denying then obvious, stop supporting organizations that peddle ignorance and scientific fraud, find sensible ways to reduce emissions and solve the problem, and invest in the long-term sustainability of our businesses and (not incidentally) the planet.

Tough choice.

When you ask consumers whether they would prefer tolink buy environmentally-sound products , or whether they would rather do business with a socially responsible company, they invariably answer in the affirmative. The problem is that their behavior rarely aligns with reality, to the point that I have started to consider surveys that ask consumers about their intended behavior to be fundamentally dishonest--surely the people writing the questions know they're invited respondents to lie?

There are, of course, several reasons for the gap between stated intent and actual behavior. One is that consumers like to appear virtuous, regardless of their actual intentions. Another is that they genuinely expect themselves to be more virtuous than they turn out to be in reality--and one reason for that is that the information they need to make the environmentally-sound or socially-responsible purchase decision is not always easy to find.

How many consumers know whether Procter & Gamble is more socially responsible than Unilever? And how many know which of the two companies makes Close-Up, Sunsilk, Pond's, Crest, Pert Plus or Zest? (The first three are Unilever; the latter three are P&G.)

In the Internet age, all of the relevant information should be easy to obtain--and as The New York Times reports, it is getting easier, thanks to Dara O'Rourke, a professor of environmental and labor policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who has launched GoodGuide, a web site and iPhone app that allows consumers to enter a product's name and discover its health, environmental and social impacts.

A decade from now, I'd expect services such as this to be ubiquitous on cell phones and iPods and on computer screens, and to cater for a variety of different definitions of social responsibility and sustainability. Companies should start planning now if they want to score high marks--and discover how many consumers really do care about their environmental and CSR impact.