Walmart Is Biggest Corporate User of Solar

SEIASEIADespite claims from a certain Republican vice-presidential candidate that the failure of Solyndra was a sign of a “make-believe market” for solar power, and grumblings from Republican congressmen and Mitt Romney about the merits of investment in solar power technology, a new report today indicates that many of the country’s biggest companies are still committed to bringing more sunlight into their energy portfolios.

Walmart uses more solar power than any other US company, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. All told, the twenty companies on the list had 279,122 kilowatts of solar installed by mid-2012, accounting for roughly twelve percent of America’s total solar capacity.

That Walmart would top the list isn’t a huge surprise, given that it’s the biggest company on Earth, but still, encouraging, right? Now if it could just clean up that pesky supply chain…

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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