Arkansas Blog

We've also heard rumors that Gore will attend a screening of his film in Fayetteville.

DBI needs to pack up the family and head over there to see it!

Is Gore prostituting himself as Wal*Mart uses him to enhance their image? Whatever. If a few people are convinced to suspend their disbelief and take a second look at climate change, it's all for the best.

The first thing they and all the other retails (Target, Kroger, etc) could do is get rid of those plastic bags. Seems someone could come up with an alternative that would bio-degrade and be a little bit more friendly to the environment. Aren't those bags a petroleum product anyway?

C'mon Warwick....you didn't tell us what corporate jet he'll be flying on. Or will he be driving a Yugo?

Ok, all you dunderheads who denied the existence of global warming in the earlier thread: are you now mad at Wal-Mart? Are you going to boycott your favorite capitalist success story? And are you going to stop going to church now that there are a growing number of evangelical preachers joining the chorus of environmentalists?

Glad to see Wal*Mart taking some progressive action, show or no show. They have so many huge stores and other facilities, meaning that they can truly show leadership that will effect meaningful positive change.

This story also underscores the point that should be clear to all: global warming is a real threat,and we can all do better to take care of the big blue marble. Kudos to the boys in the big boardroom.

"Aren't all those (plastic) bags a petroleum product anyway?".

Yes, all plastics are petroleum based. As are about 50% of the chemicals that we use in industry.

I understand that some grocery chains are taking a second look at that old stand-by, the paper sack, which is made from a renewable resource.

There are many factors in any environmental life cycle analysis. There's the energy required to manufacture and ship the bags, for one thing. E.g. plastic bags are made from petroleum, but they weigh probably less than one-tenth of a paper bag, meaning they consume at least 90% less energy being shipped. I'm not sure which way the analysis would come out, but it's not nearly as simple as tree vs. petroleum.

As another example, it is arguably better to use trees grown in a sustainable manner for the bags than to use recycled paper with all the chemicals that are required.

I remember seeing an analysis which showed that styrofoam coffee cups are better environmentally than ceramic cups. Ceramic cups are made from clay which must be mined, transported, and fired at high temperatures. Then the heavy cups are shipped and end up with the dozens of other unused promo cups with logos we all have on our shelves. On the other hand, there is a miniscule amount of materials and energy in a styrofoam cup.

Of course i'm not mad at wal-mart.

Wal-mart has been so unfairly battered by Eco-thugs like you they will whore themselves out to Gore to have the mere APPEARANCE of a better image.

Tell me, why don't you hate Target or Kmart for having no health insurance? For paying minimum wage?????

Oh yeah -- Target = Minnesota based
Kmart = Michigan based
Wal-Mart = Arkansas based...ANTI-SOUTHERN BIAS

Wal-mart doesnt care, they are trying to help their image. I APPLAUD THIS

There is backlash against Target & KMart, for in order to be competitive, they are having to go the Wal-Mart route - saying that employees on Medicaid/Medicare and spousal insurance plans IS a Comprehensive Wal-Mart Health Initiative.

(See CNBC "The Age of Wal-Mart")

I only go to Wal-Mart once or twice a year due to the policies of lowballing the suppliers so much, they are forced to open plants in China in order to supply Wal-Mart at the cost that Wal-Mart demands.

When Wal-Mart comes into a town, sales at other supermarkets and mom & pop retail stores drops 25% in the first week. No business can sustain a drop in business at that level, and most stores close their doors in the first 3 months.

So we have Wal-Mart demanding certain prices for supplies that the supplier cannot sustain at US wages & prices and so is forced to go open a plant in China.

How is that good for the US? How does that benefit anyone other than Wal-Mart?

Also, the first thing a new Wal-Mart store does is goes to the city officials and get all the tax breaks and infrastructure they can get, at no cost to Wal-Mart.

Why are cities putting in new streets, tax breaks and street lights for a corporation that can easily afford it?

You can't tell me the Walton's have been friends of Arkansas. (Bud Walton Area does not count.) Tell me of what they have done that makes them a good neighbor?
Anyone? Anyone?

I shop local wherever I can and suggest everyone else does to, if you want to be able to buy anything than at Wal-Mart.

Diversification is a true Free Market - it's stifled when one company gets all the tax breaks and the city then has to raise taxes on you and rest of the local property holders.

Bad things really do run downhill...

Sorry for the tread drift in my above post.

Gore, along with his movie, the Super Bowl and World Cup trade for Carbon Credits.

The Super Bowl planted 315,000 trees in exchange for the output they knew just by having the event generates.

If we had put more pressure on the countries cutting down the rainforests, would be in quite the dire circumstances we are now in and are now having to replant trees?

Who knows...

Wal-Mart has been doing exactly what Al Gore wants for a long time. It was under Clinton/Gore that NAFTA was passed and China received Most Favored Nation trading status. Are we to blame Wal-Mart for taking advantage of laws that the American people (through their elected officials) have decided are just and right?

Another hallmark of Clinton/Gore was universal health care. Wal-Mart offers its employees assistance in obtaining government sponsored healthcare and if media reports are to be believed, Wal-Mart employees are the largest recipients of such programs - mostly Medicaid. Additionally, Wal-Mart extends medical benefits to associates with same-sex partners.

Wal-Mart helps the poor, ostensibly a Democratic Party ideal, by providing cheap goods to those with small incomes and basic employment to millions. When hurricane Katrina hit last year, it was not the government that provided the greatest initial relief, it was Wal-Mart - itself hard hit by the storms.

On the environmental front, Wal-Mart stores take advantage of natural sunlight to reduce energy usage. The Wal-Mart distribution system relies on highly efficient water transport to import goods. Wal-Mart's inventory system streamlines the stocking and movement of goods thus reducing waste.

One point of the report was Wal-Mart's goal of improving the fuel efficiency of its truck fleet. High fuel costs are mostly a result of the disastrous foreign policy mistakes of Bush/Cheney as well as their shortsighted energy policy initiatives. The large campaign donations given by Wal-Mart executives and the Waltons to the Republican Party and its representatives seem aimed at protecting personal wealth rather than influencing the business climate.

All-in-all, Wal-Mart is probably the best friend Al Gore has ever had.

I say good for Gore! If Wal-Mart expresses any willingness to listen, it is absolutely imperative that he try to influence them.

The Thugs in Benton County are probably in shock;
Al Gore next Wednesday and right behind him on Saturday, Hillary Clinton - now ya gotta wonder what Armani Ronnie Floyd might say at Sunday's production (service). EVIL DOERS INVADE GOD'S COUNTY - they don't serve grape juice at communion there, they serve grape Koolaide. Theresa O.

Gore and the rest of us 'environmentalists' are doing humanity a great disservice.

If we succeed, like Norman Borlaug with his Green Revolution back in the 70's, we will just be enabling humans to prolong our headlong rush to overshoot the carrying capacity of this little, rocky shell. The longer before the die-off begins, the more billions of your offspring (RNina and I consciously chose to have none) will perish suddenly and uncomfortably.

The current experiment in human metastisis started only a couple of hundred years ago, less than an eyeblink in earth's history, which even the ID folks, striving for some shred of intellectual respectability, reluctantly admit started over 4 billion years back.

Humans as we define them (although some of our correspondents give strong evidence that Neanderthal DNA survives) (sorry, that's an insult to Neanderthals) didn't appear until after the retreat of the last Ice Age around 18,000 years ago, and by the time of Christ our numbers were only a quarter or a third of a billion, so near as anyone can tell.

It took until 1804 to hit our first billion, and by then we had started down the evolutionary dead end of the scientific/industrial revolution, replacing muscle and gravity with other, nonrenewable sources of energy, and making it possible for the weak to reproduce by killing off the predators, macro and micro scopic, who let only the strong survive.

Since then, human population has increased by 600%, and Samuelson in Wednesday's Post takes it as given that the increase will be 900% by 2050, not quite five of my lifetimes, and with any personal luck well beyond my end.

By comparison, individual human energy conservation will be as effective in altering the course of earth's history as pissing on a stump would be in stopping a raging forest fire.

The ice caps have been expanding and contracting in an irregular if fairly predictable pattern for at least the last 700,000 years. There's an interesting graph based on plankton analysis at: http://www.museum.state.il.us/
exhibits/ice_ages/images/specmap
_graph.gif
We're probably not quite at the end of the current retreat, and probably all that our puny human indulgence has done is to accelerate the liquidation.

It makes as much sense to believe that that melting ice caps don't affect ocean levels as it does to pretend that God buried the bones of ichythyosaurs in western Kansas as part of the creation science puzzle, but droughts and floods will seem like a spring walk beside the Buffalo when your descendants, if there are any left, are again living with glaciers south of what used to be Kansas City, and trying again to live in the caves at Lascaux. And they or their nonhuman successors surely will.

The defining crisis for the scientific/industrial dead end will not come because of global warming, which will happen anyway for the next couple of thousand years, and will beat the hell, for your billions of descendants, out of what will inevitably follow. It will also not be because in our greed we have exhausted the solar energy stored in surface of the earth's thin crust in the form of long-chain hydrocarbons.

Read Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry, and Glennon, Water Follies, and you will understand that Malthus and the Club of Rome were not wrong, they were just premature, and they were looking at food and petroleum, instead of that simple oxide of hydrogen upon which life is based.

The Ogallah Aquifer, which once produced three-quarters of the world's wheat, was laid down at the retreat of the last Ice Age, 18,000 years ago. Using technology and hydrocarbon energy, we've killed it in the last 60 years. Borlaug's revolution doubled the production of grain, but tripled the consumption of water. The Colorado and the Yellow and the Yangtze no longer reach the ocean.

Dismal science, indeed, but only if you need to believe that humans are important to the history of the earth.

By comparison, the dinosaurs were dominant for 165 million years. Whom did God love best?

I've said before that it's a good thing for Republicans that their children can't read numbers; otherwise, they would slay their parents in their sleep. But Democrats are no better, for having let it happen. It may not be your children or your grandchildren, but so sure as the next sunrise your descendants will someday realize that in your greed for a soft life you have let all the water be sucked out of the crust of the earth, and will understand that you had as much control of your need to breed as the average strephloccus bacterium.

If they are not too dehydrated and can still read, they may come piss on your grave. It will not stop the conflagration.

While your children are still naive, and hydrated, tell them you did it for love.

"what good have the waltons done for arkansas"

$350,000,000.00 to the University of Arkansas from 1998 to 2004 alone, creating an honors college, beefing up the b-school grad program, funding scholarships to bring in more bright Non-Arkansans to Arkansas (JUST LIKE WARWICK SABIN! :) )

That's pretty damn good if you ask me, and that's just a few years at one school in one town.

350 million - Son, Son Son - it cost me and my fellow tax paying Democrats that much in one lousy year to "insure" Wal-Marts employees - and that's a low ball figure.
When Wal-Mart steps up and pays a livable wage, shuts down the kiddie shops overseas and fully insures it's staff - then this Democrat will give them credit where credit is due.

Anon, you tool

You CHOSE to shop at walmart and "pay to insure these workers"

But again, if you hate walmart's practices, wh ynot hate Target and Kmart?

(oh yeah, they are based up north)

If you think Anon11:29 is talking about shopping at walmart, then you're the tool.

actually - I don't shop at Wal-Mart - avoid it at all costs.

Live here in NWA - and about 6 months ago - I wrote a check at a Neighborhood Market (coming your way soon). I am promptly handed my check back - with cancelled on it. I said, what is this? The minute that check went through Wal-Marts system as I was standing there - the funds from my checking account were whisked to Wal-Mart. To confirm this - I called my banker when I got to the parking lot - sure enough - the funds were gone.
Now I don't have to do this anymore - but in the days of struggle - I'd walk into a grocery story on Thursday night to replenish the very bare cupboards - and write a check - knowing I couldn't cover it until I deposited my paycheck in the bank the next day - and knew it took about 5 days to go through the system and felt I was OK.
NO MORE - Wal-Mart has figured out how to F**K the working slup who finds himself working from payday to payday -
I told the clerk if I wanted the funds from my bank swept away immediately, I would of given them my debit card. I got the "stare".
This progam is coming your way guys.

HEY GUINEA PIG - sorry to hear about that, but it ain't wal-mart - that's called the
"Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act" and it passed the house 405-0 (some didn't vote) --its that new set of check rules that is the death of the old "my check is in the mail" system... it sucks, but it's a law for anyone, not a "walmart controls the world" thing

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2003/roll246.xml

http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/check21/consumer_guide.htm

You can take the sacks back to Wal Mart to be recycled. Guess y'all didn't know that.

I'm not a fan of Wal Mart for lots of reasons, but if they actually go green it will make a huuuge difference. Because they are such consumers themselves, they would drive the companies they work with to go green in a ripple effect. They may also make a big difference for companies that are trying to supply green products who are struggling to survive, if they don't lowball them too much.

HEY GUINEA PIG - sorry to hear about that, but it ain't wal-mart - that's called the

Of course I knew that - maroon. But Wal-Mart has taken this to a new art form - they not only sweep the money immediatly, but they give you the great honor and service of cancelling your check in THEIR system and handing it graciously back to you - way too much Big Brother than I'm comfortable with. They can sweep the money - but I'm not interested in the poor inconvenince of poor Wal-Mart handling all the unnecessary paper work - that's what chaps my ass. I still feel bad for the slups - and the single parents who lost sometimes a necessary float.

Thanks to God for getting our rightful president to AR again.

Al Gore.