I have to admit, when bottled water first started to hit retail store refrigerators across the country I wasn’t buying it.  Why would people fork out good money for something that’s much cheaper out of the tap?  I shook my head at the people shelling out a few dollars per bottle, and I made jokes about how “Evian” spelled backwards is “Naive.”

But then I got older, and fatter, and I needed to kick my 5-bottles-of-Coke-a-day habit and bottled water became my way out.  Instead of buying a soft drink in a bottle I bought water, and I got a bit healthier.  Now I see bottled water as convenient.  I usually keep a couple of cases stocked in our fridge so we can grab some on the way out the door to t-ball games or on the way down to the lake.  It’s convenient, and actually fairly cheap.  I could probably accomplish the same thing by refilling reusable bottles, but why bother?  It’s a pain in the neck, I’d never remember to have the water ready to go when I need it and for the price of bottled water I can avoid the whole mess.

Now, though, big-government types across the country are deciding that Americans just can’t be trusted with bottled water and are embarking on a crusade to stop the sale of bottled water using the same tactics that became popular during the still-ongoing crusade against tobacco: Taxes, and lots and lots of tax dollars spent on public service campaigns.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A debate over water is boiling over in the United States and elsewhere amid growing environmental concerns about bottled water and questions about safety of tap water.

The US Conference of Mayors in June passed a resolution calling for a phasing out of bottled water by municipalities and promotion of the importance of public water supplies.

While largely symbolic, the vote highlighted a growing movement opposing regular use of bottled water because of its plastic waste and energy costs to transport drinking supplies.

Janet Larsen, director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, cites a “backlash against bottled water as more people are realizing what they get out of the bottles is not any better than what they get out of the faucet.”

The Pacific Institute, a California think thank on sustainability issues, contends that producing bottles for US water consumption required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil in 2006, not including the energy for transportation.

The group says bottling water for Americans produces more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide and consumes three liters of water for each liter of bottled water produced.

No word yet on how many tons of carbon dioxide plants, humans and animals exhale into the atmosphere each year.  I guess that sort of carbon emission doesn’t matter to the greenies.  Or, at least, it’s a very inconvenient fact for the global warming zealots.

As for the 17 million barrels of oil per year spent on producing water bottles, America uses approximately 21 billion barrels of oil/day.  That’s 7.6 trillion barrels annually. 

The 17 million barrels spent on making oil bottles represents 0.000002% of yearly consumption.  So if we ban the use of plastic water bottles we’re not exactly saving a lot of oil.

But, much as with incandescent light bulbs and tobacco Americans apparently cannot be trusted with little plastic bottles of water and so the government must step in and protect us all from ourselves.

Discussion question: How much cheaper do you think a fill-up would be at the pumps if all the money and time devoted to idiotic causes like smoking bans, light bulb bans and plastic bottle bans were spent on advocating for increased oil production?