December 12, 2024

Kunstler on Tom and His Green World

Jim Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere and wielder of one of the sharper editorial knives in the country, takes slices out of Tom Friedman’s Sunday New York Times Magazine article on the global green movement in an essay that published on his site at kunstler.com and picked up by Alternet.org. 

The money passage:

“Friedman goes on to tout Wal-Mart’s mendacious campaign to “green” up its operations by, among other things, improving the mileage of its truck fleet from 6-mpg to 12-mpg. He writes:

 Take Wal-Mart. The world’s biggest retailer woke up several years ago, its CEO Lee Scott told me, and realized with regard to the environment its customers “had higher expectations for us than we had for ourselves.” So Scott hired a sustainability expert, Jib Ellison, to tutor his company. The first lesson Ellison preached was that going green was a whole new way for Wal-Mart to cut costs and drive its profits.

  “I’ve been to dozens of permitting battles over Wal-Mart in the planning boards of America, writing on suburban sprawl, and I can assure you that the the pro Wal-Mart factions in these fights uniformly couldn’t give a f… about anything except saving five bucks on a plastic salad shooter (“we want bargain shopping!!!”). Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are precisely the members of the American public who sold their own local economies down the river, who led their towns into destitution, and who believe with all their hearts that it is possible to get something for nothing (which is why this large cohort of citizens spends so much of its meager income on lottery tickets, trips to Las Vegas, and gets suckered into ruinous “miracle” mortgages).

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