The green Christmas blues

The New York Times Style Section has a fun article today on "the new Grinch"--the family member who insists on giving green. 

Not green as in money, of course, but eco-friendly.  In short, "[t]his Grinch . . . is not out to spoil Christmas, but merely to use it as a platform to advocate ecological responsibility."

One way to look at the issue appears in the musings of the Grinches in question:  namely, we are in a transitional period from older materialism to sustainable gift-giving, a cultural moment that may require a bit of sensitivity and compromise.

Or perhaps something else is at play.

Could it be that the sustainability movement serves less to save the earth than to promote the superior virtue of its proponents?