Astonishing stuff from the Independent (H/T Matthu in the comments), who have followed up on their piece about the BBC's links to environmentalists with a look at links between the Earth Institute at Columbia University - in particular its star economist Jeffrey Sachs - and a big palm oil company in Malaysia.
As far as I can tell, the Earth Institute gets lots of money from said palm oil company and Jeffrey Sachs turns up as a talking head on TV shows saying how great their environmental stewardship is. The TV shows appear to have been made by the same company that were funding the BBC's green output.