Walmart is honest about it. They make no claims to being green, saying that sustainability saves them money and makes better products.
It also makes them money, as witness their plan to sell 100 million CFLs by the end of 2007 – a goal they met on Oct. 2. More than anyone else possibly, Walmart will make CFLs a mainstream product. This is a good thing. Huge amounts of energy will be saved.
We need to do everything possible to remediate global warming, and the more corporate giants that get involved in whatever way, the better. Sure, there is too much greenwash by corporations that don’t mean it, and sure, we need a better economic system, – but such new systems take decades to develop, and we don’t have decades.
Given that huge economic dislocations will take place because of global warming; dinosaur industries like coal will become obsolete, previously fertile areas will turn into deserts (and vice versa), there will be mass migrations to areas with water and arable land, new technologies will create new industries – so it’s more likely that new economic structures will be developed as a result of dealing with global warming and not the other way around.
We need to insure these new structures are people-friendly and hopefully that Khaki Green will not be needed.
Well, if politics and business fail us, of course the military will be called in. In the developing world, the massive and repeated ecological disasters are quite commonly met by the military. If disasters get bad enough, they certainly become national-security threats and the National Guard is called in. If the National Guard never goes home because the weather never gets any better, that’s a scenario we Viridians like to call “Khaki Green.” It’s by no means a pleasant prospect, but what else is there?
What happens if an Atlanta runs out of water? Especially if the National Guard is unavailable because they are halfway across the globe fighting in wars? So, yet again, we see that all the causes are linked.
There’s a small irony here: the more press being green gets, the more widespread it becomes, and the more cost-effective it is. The economics of scale are bringing the cost of CFLs (and other conserving items) down to where they really do make economic sense. The same will eventually happen with alternative energy– especially if the actual cost of carbon gets reflected in the price in the form of carbon taxes. But for the time being, it’s more cost-effective to conserve than to generate from renewable sources.
What’s baffling, though, are the number of people who can’t be bothered to conserve even though it would save them money. Apparently we’ve become a culture in which waste is hip. To a frugal ex-New Englander, that makes no sense at all.