Hearing the Governors – U.S. and international – at the Climate Summit was certainly encouraging. Many have championed and are implementing ambitious policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while building green economies.
Equally impressive, however, were the large corporations that have led by example.
Wal-Mart, the retail giant that environmentalists love to hate, tops that list. Wal-Mart sent volunteers and materials to Louisiana for Katrina recovery. Experiencing the devastation of that storm led to strong environmental awareness and ambitious new goals for the corporation, including the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to stabilize climate systems.
Wal-Mart’s sustainability goals:
· Be supplied 100% by renewable energy;
· Create zero waste;
· Sell products that sustain natural resources and the environment.
Environmental pledges can act as strategic bids to keep government regulators at bay. Easy to make, easy to break. Wal-Mart's goals remind me of a similar pledge made by Time Magazine -- during the last green fad of the mid-90s. Time pledged to use more recycled paper. The magazine did not honor that pledge, according to BNET:
New York City-based Time Inc., which announced just a year ago in a letter to Time readers that the company would be converting all of its titles to recycled paper, is now backtracking as well. "We have substantially reduced our use of recycled paper," says a Time Inc. executive who does not wish to be identified. "We've had to rethink our plans."
Jackson emphasizes the importance of state-level initiatives for good reason. Much of the progress on environmental issues during the past eight years has no doubt happened at the state level. We saw today that Obama has drawn heavily on the state environmental agencies to fill the ranks of his top environmental policy posts.
2 comments:
Very interesting. Companies seem to have gone to the point where they'll lie about their environementally friendly goals just to get customers. Wal-Mart will go the way of the other companies that pledged to try and preserve our world but failed.
I agree, Wal-Mart is so much a systemic part of a waste-producing order that solar panel lighting won't change the fundamentals.
Wal-Mart's big-box concept encourages driving; its low price concept encourage the production of low-quality consumer goods of low durability that will need replacement; its low wages mean that many can only shop there.
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