Learning to love Wal-Mart

We've done some good stuff on Wal-Mart's greening, but Marc Gunther's cover story in Fortune this week pulls it all together better than any single story I've seen, and advances it in some interesting ways.

Particularly in reference to our ongoing debate over morality, listen to Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott:

To me, there can't be anything good about putting all these chemicals in the air. There can't be anything good about the smog you see in cities. There can't be anything good about putting chemicals in these rivers in Third World countries so that somebody can buy an item for less money in a developed country. Those things are just inherently wrong, whether you are an environmentalist or not.

He later says:

I had an intellectual interest when we started. I have a passion today.

What moved him from intellectual interest to passion? Morality.

I hadn't realized how big a role a Walton played in the story. This line sounds like the beginning of a joke:

How do we reduce long-distance shipping?

Random factoid from a recent New Yorker article (not online, unfortunately) on, among other topics, the international shipping business:

For a pair of shoes made in China and sold in this country for fifty dollars, only about seventy-five cents of the retail cost derives from transportation. And the main costs in international shipping come from friction in the pipeline, particularly at the points of ship loading and unloading. [Emphasis added.]

Wow: shipping shoes all the way across the Pacific accounts for well under 2 percent of their retail price. And most of the transportation costs cover things other than fuel: labor, capital, financing, etc.

So for finished goods shipped over long distances, the fuel costs of transportation are probably not much more than a rounding error.

This book was made for walking

It makes intuitive sense that living in a community that encourages walking -- with sidewalks, good street connections, and homes that are close to shops and services -- would make you active and healthier.

As Sightline Institute's new book -- Cascadia Scorecard 2006: Focus on Sprawl and Health -- points out, such communities are also safer. (Full disclosure: I work at Sightline.) Residents who live in a compact community have significantly less chance of dying in a car crash -- not because they're better drivers, but because they drive less. (And car crashes, of course, are the leading killer of young people.) And they also tend to weigh less and have less risk of chronic diseases associated with obesity.

Check out the press page for pdfs and fact sheets about the new research. And check out media coverage: front page of the Vancouver Sun and in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as well.

But for a quick take, here are my top ten facts from the new Scorecard:

Can a mom in middle America survive a month without a car?

Not 20 minutes after the Amtrak clerk said our train would be at least an hour late — “probably much...

Americans and Climate Change: Setting goals II

"Americans and Climate Change: Closing the Gap Between Science and Action" (PDF) is a report synthesizing the insights of 110 leading thinkers on how to educate and motivate the American public on the subject of global warming. Background on the report here. I'll be posting a series of excerpts (citations have been removed; see original report). If you'd like to be involved in implementing the report's recommendations, or learn more, visit the Yale Project on Climate Change website.

Today's excerpt is long but I love it -- it's one of my favorite bits of the report. It's about the "four paradoxes of urgency."

Why are mayors so much smarter than national pols?

On May 10-11, the U.S. Conference of Mayors held a National Summit on Energy and the Environment (press release). They put together a document of best practices (PDF) developed in their various cities. And they agreed to develop a Energy/Environment Conservation Action Agenda (they sure do love capital letters, those mayors) to be released at their annual meeting in June. Here are six steps to be included in the agenda:

1) Invest more money in transportation options including public and mass transit, bike paths, etc.

2) Encourage at the local, state, and federal level the building or rehabilitation of more energy efficient buildings in both the public and private sector.

3) Encourage automakers to make more energy efficient cars as well as encouraging individuals to buy vehicles that are more energy efficient including alternative fuels, hybrids, and plug- in hybrids.

4) Encourage more investment in renewable and alternative energy through additional incentives.

5) Encourage more mixed-use development to allow people to have more walkable communities.

6) Encourage the public and private sector, as well as citizens, to do their part in conserving energy.

Bizarrely sensible.

I suppose it's to be expected that city leaders are somewhat wiser and more judicious than national politicians -- there's more direct accountability and fewer opportunities for media posturing. But we're talking several orders of magnitude here. Why the massive disconnect?

(via EB)

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Density is political destiny?

The Poor Man is one of my favorite blogs, but I rarely get a chance to link there, since they rarely discuss green issues.

But this post offers an ingenious (albeit largely wishful thinking) argument. It begins with this delightful 'graph:

OK, so, I'm not saying that this country won't devolve into a fascistic hellscape of race warriors and man-eating rats, disintegrating beneath the weight of its own reactionary isolationism. But even through the first six years of "WPE: The Quickening," I've been able to remain relatively sanguine about our long term prospects for one reason: if you're a Republican, demographics are against you.

("WPE," as PM fans know, is Worst President Ever.)

The argument goes like this: