To an interesting lunch meeting about sustainability with business intelligence and predictive analytics company SAS. The subject was whether many companies' environmental agendas are just the proverbial 'greenwash', or driven by a genuine commitment.

I've heard the word 'greenwash' several times this week – notably last night in the polemical, Dan Brown-esque TV thriller Burn Up. On that occasion it was uttered by implausible oil man Rupert Penry Jones – shortly before (quite literally) leaping into bed with the green movement in a bid to save the world via transatlantic coitus. But I digress.

The point still stands, however (no pun intended): to what extent is the green agenda driven by shareholders and the bottom line (being seen to be green is good for business) or by a genuine will to be less profligate with carbon? We may be made of the stuff, but many believe it will unmake us before you can say “corporate social responsibility”. (SAS is a private company, so its own bottom line is hard to fathom.)

This was the moral dilemma embodied on TV by Mr Penry Jones, who in such dramas is rarely troubled by clothes, rather like the Emperor of lore.

For SAS, the Emperor's new clothes are real enough: it seems genuine about its internal quest to be green, even going so far as to work with Reading University to design a water turbine to power the company's offices near the Thames.

(This is a great idea – the Thames being a vein of motive power running through one of the world's great cities – but, alas, planning permission apparently stands in the way.)

Richard Kellett, SAS head of solutions and technology marketing talked at length and with passion about the company's environmental credentials.

These seem deeply embedded within the company, despite CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight's tendency to take private jets (SAS owns several) to and from conferences, while his staff travel on commercial airliners. Perhaps Goodnight is living the Bond fantasy suggested by his name, and does not go gently into green issues.

In some ways, SAS' passionate and committed Kellett embodies the dilemma of many large companies dipping a toe into the waters of sustainability: his is a marketing role, as many green spokespeople's are within the IT industry, and this makes some wonder whether sustainability should be part of a sales pitch.

On the other hand, it inevitably is, and with many CIOs and board-level executives looking to third-party IT providers for guidance, it's the marketing strategists who carry thought leadership messages far and wide.

Over a lunch so extensive as to be barely sustainable, Kellett said he believed that people have been taking what he called an “outside view” of sustainability for too long – a view borne of pressure groups and campaigners – and that the real answer was an “inside out” approach to stand any chance of achieving change.

Personally, I doubt whether we would have been having the conversation without several decades' worth of environmental activism, but he is right that it is now up to companies to put it on the board's agenda as soon as possible.

This is particularly true in a week that has seen the Government's own green credentials turn a distinct shade of Brown as it seeks to water down EU directives concerning sustainable energy and the national grid.

But the elephant in the room of sustainability is an Indian one, with China not far behind it. In the West we can hardly tell Asia not to become the economic hotspot of the 21st century, but the environmental impact can at least be planned for.

As I mentioned in my blog last week, 300 million rural Chinese will shift to urban environments over the next decade or two, partly to satisfy the burgeoning economy's need for IT and business skills, plus outsourcing expertise.

Perhaps it may indeed fall on large corporations to push the sustainability message and the green agenda, as it is clear governments cannot be trusted to do it themselves.

With the IT industry producing some two percent of all global carbon emissions – a figure Kellett suggested will soon double – it is certainly true that the IT industry is best placed to clear up its own mess.