This Drive Electric Week, join ILSR in celebrating the rise of the electric vehicle and the opportunity it presents to modernize the grid, empower consumers, and benefit communities. Below, we invite you to explore our recent work on electric vehicles and energy democracy. (You can also find our full report, Choosing the Electric Avenue — Unlocking Savings, Emissions Reductions, and Community Benefits of Electric Vehicles here.)… Read More
A recent study has documented, for the first time, how the big-box retailing revolution led by Walmart and other big chains has dramatically increased the amount of energy we’re using to schlep consumer goods across the country and into our homes. … Read More
Even as Walmart has been hyping its supposed environmental epiphany, it has continued to unroll vast, low-rise supercenters at breakneck speed. Since 2005, Walmart has added more than 1,100 new supercenters, almost all built on land that hadn’t been developed previously.… Read More
While the number of miles logged going to work, social events, and other activities declined over the last decade, the number of miles families drive for shopping each year continued climb. … Read More
What journalists and even environmentalists so often fail to do in reporting on Walmart’s sustainability announcements is to provide context.… Read More
So far, the public debate about cars and climate change has been dominated by fuel economy. But driving has been growing at such a rapid pace that even a big advance in fuel economy is likely to be wiped out by ever more miles on the road. This is where local stores come in. Dozens of studies have found that people who live near small stores walk more for errands and, when they do drive, their trips are shorter. … Read More
Walmart’s sustainability campaign 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.… Read More
