Wal-Mart: The next green PAC?

It's not news that large companies hold tremendous monetary sway over our politics, especially unabashedly red ones like Wal-Mart.

But this from Green Wombat is a new twist: Wal-Mart might be responsible for nudging Republican hopefuls for 2008 toward green-washing at least, if not full green cred. They developed a sales survey of their green(-ish) products and found that "18.62 percent of residents in Republican-leaning states are making green purchases at its stores versus 18.68 percent of shoppers in Democrat-dominated states. (Of course, given the demographic of Wal-Mart's customer base, there's probably far more green blue-staters - those legions of Whole Foods shoppers who wouldn't step foot in a Wal-Mart.)." There's also that word 'resident'; I'm not sure if that's Wal-Mart's or Green Wombat's, and it could be quite different if they used 'Wal-Mart shoppers.' Regardless, they then distributed that finding to the GOP, stressing that "the environment will be a hot topic for next year's election."

Given their penchant for gathering accurate information, and their superlative clout in both the political and business worlds, this is an interesting complement to the internally-directed green actions Wal-Mart's been taking the past few years. Whatever their reasons, they are not just chipping away at all the bad juju they've produced, they're also turning themselves (and hence the entire big-box retail industry) toward a much more efficient and sustainable road.