Young activist’s blue campaign is all wet
Thirteen-year-old Robyn Hamlyn was in Meaford, Ont., last week, explaining water policy to a rapt city council. Inspired by the Maude Barlow documentary Blue Gold: World Water Wars, Hamlyn has spent the last year travelling around Ontario lobbying city councils to become blue. “Help me save our water. I can’t do it without you,” Hamlyn has pleaded to various mayors and councils. So far, she has won the support of Niagara Falls, St. Catharines and four other Ontario municipalities, and doesn’t plan to stop until every community in the province is blue.
Blue Communities, conceived by the Council of Canadians (COC) and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) along with activist Barlow, aims to protect Canada’s fresh water. To become a blue community, a municipality must ban the sale of plastic water bottles from public facilities and municipal events, must have a publicly funded and operated water system, and must deem water a human right.
Robyn Hamlyn believes Canada’s fresh water is a shrinking resource. As she stated in a March speech to the Council of Canadians, “We have to act now, instead of later. I get frustrated with people getting hung up on small details and when they should be looking at the bigger, more scarier picture.” What some Ontarians find scariest in this picture is the realization that municipalities take their advice from a 13-year-old.
Should plastic bottles be elevated to the top of anyone’s environmental agenda? Stewardship Ontario estimates that plastic water bottles make up less than one-fifth of 1% of the municipal solid-waste stream in Canada. In addition, 96% of Canadians say they recycle their plastic water bottles. If water is banned from municipal events, those present won’t go thirsty — they’ll purchase other, often less-healthy alternatives, such as pop, which is, incidentally, composed almost completely of water. Diet Coke is 99% water — privately owned water.
Hamlyn advises municipal councillors that bottled water may actually be less clean and safe than tap water. In reality, the opposite is true: Bottled water has never caused an illness in Canada, whereas tap water has sickened many, most notably in Walkerton, Ont., in 2000, where seven people died and 2,300 suffered from a strain of E. coli.
While tap water in America at least (I assume for Canada as well) is more regulated than bottled water, as we all cynically know, regulation != safety. Also, you have to adjust illness by the extreme difference in consumption. Drinking a $1/liter bottle of water means that you drink a liter or so of water. Drinking $5/thousand gallon water means you drink it like, well, water. A heavy user might use three bottles of water a day, but the average consumer uses 100 gallons of tap water. Therefore, the illness item is a non-starter.
The waste issue is a non-starter. People will either consume disposable water bottles or use and wash their own refillables as they chose, and banning water will lead only to consumption of gatorade or Coke (I don’t know if civilization has reached far enough North for them to have Dr Pepper).
However, I agree spot-on with the “Water is a Human Right” meme. Having a purchased good as a right creates unconscionable results. For comparison, the idea that free speech can be bought (or for a price, denied to others) is a travesty against the soul of democracy. However, in a mutually exclusive good like water, you must regulate, restrict, and charge for it due to the sheer amount of necessary infrastructure involved in its transport and consumption.
The “water shortage” meme is the replacement for the now-discredited “global warming” meme. While there are certainly issues with fresh water being rather unevenly distributed around the planet, the claim that we’re “running out of water” is just so much Junk Science. This is easily verified by noting that National Geographic (magazine) has already run a full issue devoted to this new “problem” (Water is Life, April 2010).
National Geographic correctly states that the amount of water on earth has not changed (significantly) since the dinosaurs were drinking it millions of years ago. Indeed, the water cycle of ocean evaporation, precipitation, movement via rivers, etc., back into the ocean — and again and again is a basic science most learn in grade school. Since this pattern depends on weather (which is always changing!) there are areas that receive more or less water. Of course, the most idiotic humans move to water short areas (like Los Angeles), then complain that water is in short supply.
The reality is, that water, like most resources are only in shortage when the prices are held at artificial levels by economically illiterate politicians elected by the idiots who decided to live in the middle of a desert because of the “nice weather” was ideal for creating movies. If water was allowed to be priced by free markets, we’d soon discover that there is no shortage and the water supply would be distributed to those who give the most value for it. (Already, cities tend to pay rather more for water while farms are often located in areas where highly subsidized water is available.)
In addition “greens” have artificially created shortages by demanding that various fish be given rights to water forcing humans (in cities and farms) to have a shortage causing substantial economic harm. Often the quantity to be dedicated to the fish has not been determined by honest scientific inquiry but is a political decision.