
Bottled water 'is immoral' - getp
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/17/eawater117.xml
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hugh
"Drinking bottled water should be made as unfashionable as smoking, according
to a government adviser"

Yeah, and I think that telling other people what to do with their lives in
order to prevent the emission of miniscule amounts of CO2 should be as
unfashionable as smoking too, but hell, what would I know?

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gruseom
I have a little theory about this. When one issue moves into the mainstream,
the avant-garde of the self-righteous find a new issue to focus on. They need
to, in order to preserve their identity of being distinct from (morally
superior to) the masses. It's analogous to music hipsters who immediately
discard a band when it becomes popular.

~~~
bocajuniors
if you cause harm to others, and are aware that you do so, you act immorally.

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SuperThread
Then "immorality" is so prevalent that calling something immoral is pointless.

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bocajuniors
you have to include the effects on yourself as well.so in the case of the
bottled water you don't have to drink poissoned water instead of bottled water
in order to act morally.

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jamesbritt
FTFA:

'A BBC Panorama documentary, "Bottled Water: Who Needs It?", to be broadcast
tomorrow says that in terms of production, a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic
generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.'

And?

How much CO2 does a liter of tap water generate, and of all the ways I could
reduce C02 generation, where does bottled water fit in?

Does the use of bottled water create more C02 than, say, raising farm animals
for consumption?

Is it more harmful than printing newspapers? Reading Web sites?

This is not to argue for or against drinking bottled water, just that the
choice of battles to fight seems goofy.

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brlittle
You know, the questions you're asking are valid. But one might well ask "When
there are other sources of clean, potable water available, why is it
necessary, or even desirable, to drink water imported all the way from Fiji."
Is Fijian water qualitatively that much better than it justifies the
relatively monumental effort of transporting it to Manhattan for consumption?

I certainly won't deny that there are trendoids who glom onto this sort of
thing as the latest cause célèbre, but to pass it off (as some commenters are
doing) as mere trendy moralism or yet another "cause" repugnant to whatever
brand of libertarianism is hip this month, is to ignore valid questions about
the justice and justifiability of your actions.

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Electro
Well I'm going to do my part to save the environment. I'll cycle to work; thus
eating more food and respiring less efficiently and producing more CO2. I'll
also eat more healthily, get more greens in me and protein; thus producing
more methane which is 25 times worse than CO2 emissions.

Also, for when I do need to drive, I'll switch to a hybrid. However, that
requires a large amount of lead and acids that are extremely harmful to the
environment and it also takes more energy to produce an hybrid car than is
actually saved in the average use of the car.

I will personally help destroy the environment by doing EVERYTHING I've been
told should SAVE IT. I fucking love irony!

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brlittle
Contrary to what I suspect was your intent, you aren't being clever. You're
just reinforcing the point that every choice has consequences...some intended,
some not. For instance, the net increase in CO2 from your "cycle to work"
respiration would, I suspect, be less damaging than the total net consequences
of building, maintaining and driving a car. It'd be cheaper, too. Eating more
greens might well make you fart more, though that's less than certain, but it
would surely be less than the methane produced by the beef cattle that less-
healthy eaters consume so voluminously.

Perhaps with some expansion, your reply could have made a serious
contribution. Instead, it comes off looking glib.

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wallflower
A doctor told me that if you don't have a water filter, _you_ are the water
filter. That being said, the difference between the quality of most municipal
tap water and bottled water is marketing dollars. In some countries, it is a
fact that you have to boil the water before drinking it. I was so nervous
about avoiding sickness on my last trip to a Latin American country that I
used bottled water (on my doctor's recommendation) to rinse out my toothbrush
and avoided salad.

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wallflower
This reminds me of the people who shop at Whole Foods yet dont recycle and
celebrities who drive hybrid cars yet live in 10k sq. ft. houses where the
AC/heating bill is hundreds/month. Classic human paradox of how hard it is to
do everything right and/or people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones

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ivankirigin
Bottled water "is portable"

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spot35
It's potable as well

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ivankirigin
Yah, as soon as I wrote it I wanted to start a brand "portable potable".

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jsjenkins168
What exactly causes the 600x CO2 increase from production of bottled water vs.
tap water? Creating the plastic bottle?

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Tichy
Presumably driving it around in trucks?

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DaniFong
Both, probably. Both plastic and the cost of shipping scale roughly with the
cost of petroleum.

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Electro
CO2 is irrelevant, even if production is switched to biodegradeable plant-
based oils and shipping is done over short distance with a renewable energy
source, people will still complain about bottled water.

They complained before global warming was even thought about, and they're just
using fantasy CO2 statistics to bolster their claims. In fact, in some areas
with low access to water, governments spend millions merely pumping water up
elevations. I know where I live they have to do it, and we're only slightly up
hill from the supplier. I wonder how much CO2 they're putting into the
atmosphere by using vast quantities of power to pump water up a gradient,
which is less efficient than merely moving it.

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DaniFong
This is not some competition to show the wrongness of the other side. These
are questions for action.

I'm having trouble seeing how one could design a pumping system so poor that
it's cheaper to ship water via truck in miniature plastic bottles produced in
industrial parks on average thousands of miles away. Even an Archimedes screw
is close to optimal energy efficiency if you have a gear system.

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ckinnan
Part of the problem is that our socialized, monopoly municipal water suppliers
provide unhealthy, bad tasting water.

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boucher
The United States has excellent drinking water, pretty much everywhere. Issues
of taste are usually caused by old pipes on the "last mile" of the water's
path. So, buy a Brita filter. That's a market that actually makes sense.

~~~
Electro
IMO Brita filtered water tastes worse than the water out of the tap. My
parents bemoan unfiltered water, I'm the opposite. For the life of me I can't
drink filtered water because I don't find it refreshing as it taste clinically
sterile.

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tocomment
So what should one drink while driving long distances? Will they install water
fountains at gas stations?

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kajecounterhack
Well the way I look at this, we're paying for it right? Supply and demand,
people.

~~~
brlittle
Actually, the argument being made is that you're _not_ paying for it. The
externalities -- degraded environment, pollution, economic damage, etc. -- are
being passed on to the powerless in other countries, or to future generations.
In economic jargon (or as much thereof as I remember from college) there are
negative externalities which are unaccounted for in the current market price.

I believe one of the arguments being made is also that if those externalities
_were_ incorporated into the price, bottled water would be much less appealing
on the basis of cost.

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davidw
Precisely. The 'correct' thing to do to strike a balance between freedom and
preventing damage is to levy a tax to 'cancel out' the externality. If people
really, really want their bottled water, they'll be free to buy it, but
factored into that price will be the true costs.

That's the theory, anyway. Calculating those costs may not always be obvious.

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DanielBMarkham
Some related commentary

[http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/02/a_modest_s...](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/02/a_modest_sacrifice_for_the_cli.html)

