Only five to ten years earlier, it would have been unthinkable for the chief executive of one of the big three automakers to articulate such a proactive environmental stance on behalf of his firm. Even today, over ten years later, among the mass public and many political elites sympathetic to business, denial of climate change is not exceptional. Over the course of the 1990s, however, large firms increasingly adopted environmental policies that were beyond compliance. Although some critics suggested that such efforts were little more than “greenwashing” – since many such efforts were highly visible but not the most effective (Ramus and Montiel 2005) – there is considerable evidence that many firms' policy shifts were sincere. For example, in the case of Ford, between 1996 and 1998, every one of its plants around the globe instituted an environmental management system that was certified as compliant with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001, and in 1999, Ford began to require its suppliers to have at least one facility that was similarly compliant (Eisner 2004). Other firms trying to minimize the environmental impact of their supply chains include Home Depot, Herman Miller, and American Electric Power (Deutsch 2007b).