MOUNTAIN VIEW – In his final stop of a three-day trip to California, President Barack Obama spoke Friday at a Walmart in the heart of Silicon Valley, pushing his plan for energy reform that calls for the conversion of more businesses, homes and government buildings to solar power.
“We are blessed when it comes to energy, but we’re much more blessed when it comes to the innovation and the dynamism and the creativity of our economy,” Obama said.
The president’s energy initiative — an executive action that calls for investments in more solar energy jobs, upgrading homes and buildings to be more efficient, and partnerships with the housing and tech industries — is a core piece of Obama’s oft-derailed climate change effort and aims to move the country away from foreign oil dependency while creating more jobs to spur the nation’s wavering economic recovery.
However, Obama’s choice of Walmart to highlight private-sector energy efficiency enraged those who see the retail giant and its low-wage jobs as a major driver of the income gap that Obama so often speaks of trying to narrow. Hundreds of labor union members and other activists protested outside the store Friday as Obama spoke inside.
Efrain Aguilera, a farmworker from Salinas, was among hundreds of protestors outside Walmart voicing his disappointment with the President, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Holding the corner of a giant sign asking the President to “support our Walmart workers,” Aguilera said the labor movement feels betrayed by Obama because it worked so hard to get him elected and now he’s lending support to Walmart.
U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now a UC Berkeley professor, agreed.
“What numbskull in the White House arranged this?” Reich wrote on his Facebook page Friday, noting that Walmart’s greenhouse gas emissions grew 2 percent last year to nearly half a million metric tons while the company still lags behind other big companies on renewable power.
“More to the point, Walmart is one of the nation’s largest and worst employers — low wages, unreliable hours, few benefits, discrimination against women, and anti-union,” Reich wrote. “Most of the rest of us are subsidizing Walmart by paying for the food stamps and Medicaid its workers need because Walmart doesn’t pay them enough to keep them out of poverty.”
But its commitment to big government energy policies is building up for the big box retailer.
Walmart has just committed to doubling on-site solar energy projects at its U.S. stores, Sam’s Clubs and distribution centers by 2020 – part of the company’s global initiative to drive production or procurement of 7 billion kilowatt-hours of renewable energy by the end of that year.
The Mountain View store in which Obama spoke now gets 14.5 percent of its energy from solar systems built and installed by SolarCity, based in San Mateo and one of Walmart’s biggest solar vendors, according to the Mercury News.
The President’s trip to California included two Democratic National Committee fundraisers Thursday night in Los Altos and San Jose.
More information at mercurynews.com.
