Wal-Mart: Big carbon footprint—always

When all else fails, blame Wal-Mart, right?

Popular environmental-news magazine Mother Jones recently published a collection of Wal-Mart vs. the world info charts, which compared the mega retail chain and its environmental impact to that of other not-so-relative benchmarks.

Consider: According to Mother Jones, the combined area of each and every Wal-Mart store covers more square miles than the island of Manhattan. There are nearly five times more Wal-Mart employees than U.S. firefighters. And Wal-Mart’s CO2 emissions, at 21 million metric tons, are greater than the 50 lowest-CO2 emitting countries on the planet combined.

Low prices, maybe. Big carbon footprint, for sure.