During one of U2's huge gigs in Croke Park, Dublin, in 2005, that ever-modest, shrinking violet otherwise known as Bono stopped singing and hushed the band. The audience fell silent. In the stillness of Ireland's premiere sports arena the lead singer began to clap slowly, rythmically.

"Every time I clap my hands," he said, with meaning, "another child in Africa dies."

Initially the reaction was a stunned silence, broken a few seconds later by someone shouting.

"Well stop clapping your f'ing hands then!"

The story, whilst amusing and probably apocrophal, illustrates the problem asssociated with someone rich and famous preaching to people about the need to change their behaviour and save The Planet. Bono, for all his achievements, has been at times pilloried: for moving his company off-shore to avoid paying taxes in Ireland and for preaching to the man in the street about the need to save Africa while grossing well over $200 Million from the 2005/6 Vertigo Tour. And allegedly for sending a private jet back home because he'd forgotten his hat.

So it is with Honda and its controversial green initiative which sees its RA107 cars bedecked in an image of the earth. An F1 team promoting environmental issues. Corporate greenwash is what it's called, and critics of the initiative have been having a field day. Honda championing the cause of environmentalism seems to some like asking Hannibal Lecter to promote healthy eating. One friend asked me if the bullshit fed to the media in the press conference would be used to start a compost heap at the factory.

Unsurprisingly the tree huggers of the world have been out in force, turning puice at the very timerity of a car company attempting to take the high ground in the global environmental debate. Not to mention using Formula One to do it! Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have, perhaps naturally and undoubtedly genuinely, rushed to point out that the team will produce a zillion tonnes of CO2 flying around the world, that F1 cars are hundreds of times more polluting than your average road car and that Honda are, in fact, bad people because they apparently haven't met every scrap of hastily churned out legislation aimed at reducing emissions.

The story goes that Honda had a problem. It didn't have a sponsor to replace Lucky Strike hence, faced with the embarrassment of having nothing to put on their black canvass except, er, a blank canvass, they had a chat with their friend Simon Fuller at 19 Management. As a result those clever agency types came up with a corker of a PR stunt to promote Honda's green credentials and simultaneously distract attention from the fact that whilst Williams have been lining up AT&T and Lenovo to join RBS in spite of having their worst season in living memory, Honda F1 hasn't found a partner even though Jenson won in Hungary.

So what do I think about it? And does it matter?

Well I think that, last time I looked, Honda owned its own F1 team. And, in the same way that when you own your own house you can paint it whatever colour you fancy, the same applies to Honda. If you paint your house a delicate shade of off-white and put flowers in the garden, everyone says it's nice and what a great neighbour you are. If, however, you paint your front door purple with the word 'Death' on it, board up the windows, have it pebble dashed in volcanic ash and put a sign up in the garden announcing that your place is now the HQ of the local chapter of Hells Angels, people get upset. They might call the police. Or ring your door bell and run away.

The reaction to Honda has been similar. So, they haven't found a huge sponsor in the vein of ING or Vodafone. Well, you know, that's not the work of a moment, particularly when you are a car company and, frankly, the bills are going to be paid anyway. Some say that Honda must be pretty desperate to run this environmental campaign, especially as they are such a small car company and clearly need sponsors.

Well, you know, small is relative. In 2005 Honda was the world's 7th largest car manufacturer measured in sales volume. The largest two are GM and Toyota and, since Toyota is in F1, let's compare them. In the year to March 2007 Toyota anticipate global sales of 8,470,000 vehicles, producing total revenues of Yen23.2 Trillion (£100 Billion) and net income of Yen1.55 Trillion (£6.7 Billion). In the same period Honda expects to have sold 3,655,000 cars, which seems like a poor show, but then you have to add the 10,460,000 motorcycles and the 6,120,000 power products. That's lawnmowers, outboards and generators to you and me. Which means Honda has sold Yen11.1 Trillion (£48 Billion) worth of gear and made Yen560 Billion. Or £2.4 Billion in English money.

Considering this I think that the upside of shedding the tobacco-stained image and having to pay for a new paint job to promote Honda's environmental credentials probably hasn't led CEO Fukui-san to lose sleep.

Honda's new strategy is massively brave, fraught with risk in an image conscious world where trial by media and the power of environmental lobby groups can bring even the most powerful companies to their knees. Just ask BP - one big explosion at its Texas oil refinery and a bit of a leak in its Alaska pipeline and suddenly BP's nice new green and yellow flower logo has wilted badly.