Tell Wal-Mart to Live Up to Its Clean Power Promise

Saturday, August 30, 2008
Posted in Renewable Energy Sustainability | Tagged Renewable Energy, Sustainability

Wal-Mart, the largest private purchaser of electricity in the United States, claims that environmental sustainability is among its chief goals. The retailer’s much-hyped sustainability initiatives include being supplied by 100-percent renewable energy. Going green is how Wal-Mart’s now branding itself.

Except, of course, when it comes to taking more than token action to meet its renewable power objectives.

If Wal-Mart covered the roofs of its stores with solar panels, the resulting solar acreage would roughly equal the size of Manhattan, an island of 23 square miles. But with more than 4,000 Supercenters, Discount Stores, and Sam’s Clubs, Wal-Mart has only proposed to install solar panels on 22 of its stores. In other words, after claiming for years that it wants to be supplied completely by renewable energy, Wal-Mart has not even come close to reaching 1 percent of this goal.

Wal-Mart is skirting California law and refusing to incorporate cost-effective features like solar panels in new stores throughout California.

The California Environmental Quality Act requires that new projects in California adopt all feasible measures to lessen the significant impacts of their greenhouse gas emissions. There is simply no good reason for Wal-Mart to refuse to incorporate solar panels into its store designs. That’s why the Center for Biological Diversity is taking the massive corporation to court for its failure to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions generated by new proposed Wal-Mart Supercenters in the Golden State.

Please sign our petition to Wal-Mart calling for it to follow the law and live up to its sustainability goal. And please forward this email to as many people as possible, so that the retail giant will hear loud and clear how many of us are outraged by its hypocritical business practices.

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