Everything’s Gone Green, as the New Order song has it. As you may know, NBC TV has gone green this week, stacking its lineup with allegedly eco-friendly messages, plotlines, and other empty gestures.

This is just part of a general cultural trend toward accepting the premise of the global warming alarmists and their preferred policy of vastly increasing government control over our lives and forcibly returning wealthy modern societies to the supposedly ideal conditions of the 1830s—a society on which they poured undisguised contempt untiil the eco-bug hit.

All of this is a classic case of rent-seeking. That’s when people try to use government to enrich themselves at the expense of others. It’s when businesses push for subsidies, tax breaks, crippling reguations on their competitors, and the like—all the great variety of "corporate welfare" schemes. It’s a matter of influential people using government’s power of coercion to force others to do "the right thing"—which just happens to result in money flowing toward those who advocate the policies.

Business is by no means immune to this. Big corporations such as GE are in bed with organizations that are actively working for their destruction. The companies hope to get the anti-liberty zealots to leave them alone and undermine their competitors instead, and the corporate collaborators also hope to get the government to use taxpayers’ money to pay their companies to pretend to save the environment.

It’s all a huge scam, nothing more and nothing less.

As Jonah Goldberg notes in his current column, what’s really behind every business’s leap aboard the global warming alarmism bandwagon is a hope of making a buck from the fools who’ll gladly use their own government to destroy modernity:

You do know that the parent company of NBC is General Electric, right? You do know that for GE, green is first and foremost the color of money, right? As Tim Carney explains in vivid detail in his wonderful book, The Big Ripoff, GE’s “ecomagination” campaign is simultaneously a way to brand itself as a “progressive” company and a means of shaking the money tree—the most sustainable planting of them all—growing in Congress’ backyard.

When the global company launched the ecomagination campaign, guess where it held the launch party? Its D.C. lobbying office, of course.

While sipping from wine made at a solar-powered winery, the head of GE, Jeffrey Immelt, proclaimed, “Industry cannot solve the problems of the world alone. We need to work in concert with government.” Translation: The King Kong of the corporate world needs tax breaks, subsidies and favorable regulations in order to make green technology profitable. Indeed, GE has nearly cornered the market on the solar panels necessary to implement Kyoto-style reforms. Global warming hysteria is good for its bottom line.

Liberals and environmentalists love to whine about special breaks for corporations, and they work themselves into paroxysms of paranoia about how big corporations propagandize against action on climate change. The reality is exactly the opposite. GE, DuPont, British Petroleum, and countless other big corporations routinely propagandize in the other direction, largely to win governmental support they don’t need. But so long as environmentalists approve of the message, they’ve got no problem whatsoever with the messengers.

When a big company tells you that people pressing for big government are right—hide your pocketbook.