This morning, the Daily reports on "earth-friendly" plans for the new Wal-Mart in LeRoy.
Le Roy's store also will include what is known as "daylight harvesting," he said.
A sensor on the floor determines how much sunlight is entering the store. If it's a significant amount, the sensor automatically turns the lights down "so we don't use that energy," Serghini said.
Of course, not all environmentalist buy into a Green Wal-Mart.
This cannot be dismissed as greenwashing. It's actually far more dangerous than that. Wal-Mart's initiatives have just enough meat to have distracted much of the environmental movement, along with most journalists and many ordinary people, from the fundamental fact that, as a system of distributing goods to people, big-box retailing is as intrinsically unsustainable as clear-cut logging is as a method of harvesting trees.
Here's the key issue. Wal-Mart's carbon estimate omits a massive source of CO2 that is inherent to its operations and amounts to more than all of its other greenhouse-gas emissions combined: the CO2 produced by customers driving to its stores.
The post asserts that big box stores encourage us to drive further -- an average two miles longer each trip -- to do our shopping.
Will a Green Wal-Mart encourage you to shop there?( surveys)
If it keeps more tax dollars
If it keeps more tax dollars in the county, that's all that matters to me.