In Defense of Bottled Water

Bottled water has been under attack for years, its critics call it a rip off because water is free from taps and fountains. Environmentalists complain that plastic water bottles fill up landfills and contribute to global warming because they are made of oil. Now the forces of Neo Prohibition are targeting bottled water because it is a luxury that harms the environment.

I have to rise to defend bottle water here because I think it is a very good thing. Sure, bottled water is expensive (compared to tap water) but compared to soda pop it’s possibility cheap. Bottled water quenches your thirst without making you fat, giving you sugar diabetes or rotting your teeth like soda pop does. Bottled water maybe expensive but when you need a thirst quencher say when you’re mowing a lawn on a hot summer day or are on a long road trip bottled water can be a lifesaver. Literally, because it is a healthy alternative to unhealthy soda pop.

I can remember the days before bottled water, you’d be doing something like mowing a lawn on a hot summer day and you’d need a thirst quencher. Somebody would go to get one and come back with a can of soda pop. Sure, soda tastes good but it doesn’t quench your thirst and if you’re really thirsty it’s almost sickening.

Soda pop is also very bad for people, doctors tell us that soda is major contributor to America’s obesity epidemic. If we could get every office worker to replace his or her pop with bottled water we’d save lives and untold billions in medical costs (if cities were really smart they’d ban the soda machine and sit refrigerators stocked with free bottled water in offices). Yet the Conference of Mayors is trying to ban bottled water because it harms the environment. I wonder twenty years from now will some obese office worker be suing the city because they took away his Aquafina but left the Coke machine in the break room.

This move is motivated by self righteous arrogance rather than concern for the environment. If the Mayors really wanted to help the environment they’d be pressuring the bottled water makers to switch to recyclable aluminum cans, no they are trying to ban bottled water for the same reason Carry Nation and the temperance movement tried to ban alcohol: they want to force their morality on the rest of us.

The Neo Prohibitionists have become interested in the environment because support for their last two crusades is petering out. The public is finally seeing the war on drugs for the stupidity it really is while even the Congressional Democrats have given up on gun control (already largely discredited by Ruby Ridge and Waco).

To keep their political movements alive and tax dollars flowing into their pockets the prohibitionists are looking for new bogeymen to fight. Politicians love prohibition it gives them an issue to debate and another reason to waste our tax money. Some are talking about health and banning transfat and oil, red meat will surely be next. Of course this will cause a backlash so some clever neo prohibitionists have found a new cause the Environment.

They seek to control our lifestyles and expunge anything from them they see as harmful to the environment. Naturally these attacks will be highly selective no serious effort will be made to curtail automobile use (or more sensibly give the average man real alternatives to the car) or to tap into workable alternative energy sources (nuclear power). Instead they’ll concentrate on little things like body water that will make the ecogeeks feel a little less guilty while they’re tooling around in their SUVs. The yuppies will feel that something is being done for the environment because Joe Sixpack can’t buy a bottle of Arrowhead anymore.

Of course a lot of you will say, there’s no way they can ban bottled water. Of course back in 1917, (exactly 100 years ago) a lot of our great grandparents were saying there’s no way they can ban beer (they did). So we’d better watch these Neo prohibitionists carefully it won’t take them long to go from banning bottled water to banning any consumer good they see as a threat to the environment and God knows what that will be.