First, one cannot compare up-front costs with ongoing savings in a simplistic statement about ‘spending X to save Y’. Unlike X, the savings are ongoing, long into the indefinite future. Even economic quantities like net present value or ROI do not fully capture that distinction. In reality, one might spend X to save Y over Z years – and another Y+ in another Z years, and another Y+ after Z more years, and so on (the Y+ accounts for rising fossil-fuel-based energy costs). And at some later date, one will have to spend another quantity to replace the original equipment, probably at some cost much less than the original X.

And the action provides more than just “a warm fuzzy feeling”. It is precisely actions like this that will, when added together all across the nation and the world, eventually form our summed response to climate change (together with governmental actions). That warm fuzzy feeling is actually a critically important component of the summed response. AGW is a distributed problem – and only a distributed solution can hope to address it. Albertsons is taking one very tiny baby step along that distributed solution pathway.