16 Ideas for the Planet

New stores will use less energy
Hurricane Katrina was a big turning point for us. It showed us that we've got a role we can play that might be greater than we realized. Two years later, we have prototype stores—the first is in Kansas City, Mo. It uses LED lighting in the freezers, and a heating and cooling system without a fan. That store uses 20 percent less energy than a store we'd have opened in 2005. One product we're promoting heavily are compact fluorescent light bulbs, or CFLs. They account for only 5 percent of light-bulb sales, but at Wal-Mart we've been redoing our aisles to make CFLs more visible. Today 20 or 30 percent of the light-bulb aisles will be CFLs, mostly at eye level. We have a goal of selling 100 million CFLs in 2007, more than double what we did last year. That will save our customers $3 billion on electricity. It will save 700 million incandescent bulbs that will never have to be produced. It will prevent 20 million metric tons of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere.

THOMAS E. LOVEJOY, PH.D.
President of H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and The Environment

The ocean's food chain is at risk
We were one of the first to call attention to the acidification of the oceans. The oceans take up a huge amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. A portion of that carbon gets turned into carbonic acid, so that the more carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the more acidic the oceans become. The oceans are now 30 percent more acidic than they were before the Industrial Revolution. It's the most chilling change I've seen in my professional career. If it continues, tiny organisms at the base of the food chain will have their shells dissolve while the animals are still alive. It will also threaten coral reefs, which are already stressed by rising temperatures and fishing practices. We issue a report every five years called The State of the Nation's Ecosystems, which includes 113 indicators of environmental health, from chemical contaminants to harmful algae blooms. We're trying to boil it down to just three or four that could be released quarterly, like the leading economic indicators, but for the environment. It would give people a sense of whether we're making progress or losing ground.

MAJORA CARTER
Executive Director And Founder, Sustainable South Bronx

A chance to fix a neighborhood
There is a huge hole in our economic fabric where clean tech should be. And residents of this community can be trained to fill these "green collar" jobs. Instead of all these economic-growth agencies pushing for stadiums or big-box stores where the average wage is $7 an hour, the city could invest in cleaner transportation systems such as barges and rail lines to connect us to the rest of the city. We could take all the waste grease from the food industry that now gets trucked here for disposal and process it instead into biodiesel fuel. Workers will install "green roofs" on commercial buildings, which will provide cooling and generate oxygen. This summer we are hiring greenway stewards to help maintain our new street-tree network, which will eventually cover 11 miles in the South Bronx. We're going to plant herbs in the tree pits. It'll be beautiful. People can do all of this while making a living wage. They will be participating in the economic and environmental transformation of their own lives. The possibilities are endless.

JEROME RINGO
President, The Apollo Alliance

Today the environment is at the forefront of everyone's thoughts, not only in this country but also worldwide. I haven't seen an issue with such a magnetic capacity to bring people together since the Civil Rights movement.