Of course, no one would pretend that none of it does any good. It is hard to burn your way through $20bn without getting something for all that money, even for a corporate responsibility official. The trouble is, it has become a smokescreen. After all, VW is far from alone. BP made a big play of its green credentials before the Deepwater Horizon disaster (remember all those wind turbines that sprouted up on filling stations). The energy company Enron won a host of CSR awards before it went bankrupt in 2001 amid an accounting scandal. Just about every company caught up in a scandal turns out to have a CSR department spending millions. It would be easy to dismiss that as harmless do-gooding. But there is more to it than that. It is, in reality, a way of allowing companies to make a very public display of how virtuous they are, and that allows them to stop giving serious thought to what their actual purpose is.