With brief, occasional, italicized and sometimes gratuitous commentary…
• Yahoo Finance reports that Walmart "is doubling-down its sustainability efforts to combat climate change, laying out a plan to be a zero-emission company across its global operations by 2040 … Walmart plans to power all of its 11,500 locations worldwide with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar by 2035. So far, the company powers around 30% of its operations from renewable energy. The company is targeting 50% by 2025, before hitting its newest target of 100% by 2035."
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon says that the company wants to "play an important role in transforming the world's supply chains to be regenerative," warning that “we face a growing crisis of climate change and nature loss and we all need to take action with urgency.”
Walmart is too big and too smart to engage in climate change denial. But at the risk of seeming just a bit cynical - and that's really not my intention - it seems to me that there is at least a small connection to its desire to acquire part of TikTok, an app used by young people. This younger generation, to which Walmart would very much like to have access, and which it would like to turn into customers, has little doubt about the devastating impact of climate change. This generation will want nothing to do with companies or people that it perceives as being blind to its concerns or ignorant about realities that impact its future. I feel strongly that companies have to keep that in mind going forward, and suspect that the folks at Walmart are highly aware of this.
