Everything has a green label on it now, and the label is doing work that a simpler word would do better.
Take lighting. The efficient bulbs currently being pushed are going to win, and they are going to win for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone’s conscience. They use a fraction of the electricity, they last years rather than months, and over the life of the bulb the arithmetic is not close. That is a cost argument. It would sell perfectly well as a cost argument, to people who have never given a moment’s thought to carbon, and it would sell to more of them.
Dressing it in environmental language narrows the audience and invites an argument that does not need to happen.
Solar is the opposite case and gets the same label. Panels are improving and the price per watt keeps falling, but the honest position today is that domestic installations pay back on a timescale that depends heavily on what your government is contributing. That is not a criticism of the technology, which is doing what early technology does. It is a caution about a sector whose economics currently rest on a subsidy that can be withdrawn by an election.
The place I find this most irritating is computing equipment, because the sums there are almost never done properly.
A new machine that draws forty watts less than the one it replaces gets sold as an environmental improvement. Nobody counts what went into building it. Manufacturing a computer consumes a great deal more energy than the machine will use in its entire operating life, and that is before you account for the mining, the shipping, and the disposal of whatever it replaced.
Replacing a working three year old computer with an efficient one is almost certainly worse than keeping the old one until it dies. The efficiency gain is real and visible on the electricity bill, and the manufacturing cost is real and invisible because it was paid somewhere else by someone else.
Which is the pattern across most of this. Efficiency gets adopted when it saves money, at exactly the rate that it saves money, and no faster. The genuinely useful developments are the ones where those two things point the same way, and the marketing language obscures which ones those are.
If it is cheaper, say cheaper. The people who care about the other thing will work it out.