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Today's Washington Post reports
on the bottled water industry, before whom our esteemed Senate
Republican leaders,the Farm Bureau and its supplicants lay prostate.
Does anyone find a sick irony in the fact that some of our politicians
will move heaven, earth and our trout streams to create more growth in
Michigan for a water export business that is an environmental disaster
but that these same politicians refuse to pass only the most modest
possible incentives to promote a new clean energy economy for our
state? Fortunately, some governments are catching on and as the Post
reports the U.S. Conference of Mayors has now made Michigan's new
favorite growth industry--bottled water--taboo among its members. And
you thought eight cylinder SUVs were a bad economic bet. What's Colorless, Tasteless and...smells like Money? On its face, the bottled-water trade makes selling snow to Eskimos sound like a reasonable business proposition: Tons of carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere each year to produce and transport a product thousands of miles from Place A to Place B, when an identical product is already available in Place B in a form that is typically much cheaper, rigorously tested and sometimes safer. And afterward, millions of plastic bottles end up in landfills. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/29/AR2008062901872.html?hpid=topnews --
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