the 651st Word

“How did we get to the point where we’re paying for bottled water? That must have been some weird marketing meeting over in France. Some French guy’s sitting there like, ‘How dumb do I think the Americans are? I bet you we could sell those idiots water.’”

That’s a little humor from Jim Gaffigan, but it’s not so far from the truth.

In reality, it was Frenchman Gustave Leven who convinced American Bruce Nevins to bring Perrier, a carbonated mineral water packaged in glass bottles, to the American market in1978.

Today, an average American drinks almost 30 gallons of bottled water a year, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, mostly from clear plastic bottles—about 50 billion clear plastic bottles, to be exact.

Go to your refrigerator and grab a bottle of water, if you have one. Dump out the water. You haven’t just wasted one bottle of water, but actually three. For every liter of water that is bottled, two are wasted during the filtration process.

Now fill it up a quarter of the way full with oil. That is approximately how much energy was required to get that bottle of water to your refrigerator. The Pacific Institute estimates that 17 million barrels of oil a year are required to package and deliver bottled water, enough to run one million cars for a year.

And please recycle the bottle. Only 20% of bottles are recycled, while 38 billion bottles wind up in a landfill where they will stay for the next 1,000 years.

Not only is bottled water unbelievably wasteful, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water, depending on the brand. And what do you get for it?

If you think you get cleaner, healthier water, you might be wrong.

Standards for tap water, set by the EPA, are more stringent than FDA regulations for bottled water, which it regulates as a food. For example, tap water cannot contain any traces of E. coli or fecal coliform bacteria.  The FDA has no such provisions.

Of course, if a batch of bottled water turned out to be contaminated, it would be recalled. There have been 100 such recalls since 1990 for mold, benzene, microbes, and coliform.

Testing of bottled water in multiple studies has found bacterial or chemical contaminants, including carcinogens, at levels above state or industry standards. Twenty percent of bottled water has more chlorine than allowed by California state standards, according to a study by the Environmental Working Group.

And, in a recent study from Goethe University in Germany, water bottles made from PET plastic, marked with a No. 1 recycling code, leached estrogenlike compounds into the water, which could cause developmental problems in fetuses and children and reproductive disorders in adults. The study comes on the heels of others that have shown bisphenol A (BPA), a compound found in non-disposable plastic bottles, can cause similar problems.

But maybe you just prefer the taste of bottled water to tap water.

Bruce Nevins, the man who introduced America to bottled water, couldn’t identify his own brand of bottled water in a blind taste test with six others on a live radio show. Of the seven samples, he took five guesses to pinpoint his own.

I challenge you to try a taste test yourself. (Just so you know, in Fort Collins you’ll be going up against some of the purest water in the world.) If you can’t tell the difference, stop buying bottled water.

Read on:

Take a pledge to “Think Outside the Bottle”

Instead of buying that next case of bottled water, think about donating the money to provide safe drinking water to one of the billion people worldwide who does not have access to it

Other articles on bottled water:

In Readers Digest

In the New York Times

In Fast Company Magazine

The American economic juggernaut is growing again. Gross domestic product—the goods and services produced by people and property in the U.S.—grew at a rate of 3.5 percent last quarter, according to the Commerce Department.

Economists, politicians and pundits all agree: Growth is good.

In 1776, when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, economic growth—in the simple terms of increasing GDP—could increase quality of life by securing basic necessities for most Americans. That time has passed. Yet economists and politicians still blindly promote policies that aim only to increase the amount of stuff the economy produces.

Up to a certain point, growth has done us considerable good. But that point may be surprisingly far behind us. According to one analysis, extra income is correlated to increased happiness only up to $10,000.  Past that, the correlation disappears.

In the developed world, more has very little to do with better.

Crime, divorce, alcoholism, depression and suicide have all increased along with GDP around the developed world.  So has the gap between the rich and the poor. Growth has not necessarily caused these problems, but it certainly hasn’t alleviated them.

Most significantly, we are not any happier now than before. Since 1950, gross domestic product per capita has tripled. The average American family now lives in a house twice as big, owns twice as many cars, flies twenty-five times as far, and uses twenty-one times as much plastic. However, the number of people who say they are happy has decreased steadily since then.

We began this economic experiment with a 3.8 billion-year store of natural capital in old-growth forests, rich topsoil, fossil fuels and other natural resources.  We are going through it like it’s free. In the accounting of GDP, it is free.

As The Economist put it, a country could increase its GDP just by cutting down all its trees, selling them as wood chips and then gambling the money away playing tiddly-winks. Some developing countries are actually doing something very similar.

Economists may argue that technologies will be invented to replace any natural resource if it becomes scarce enough.  Empirically, this is not evident.

As Paul Hawken points out in the book Natural Capital, progress is not restricted by the number of chainsaws but by the disappearance of primary forests. Plywood may be a suitable substitute for sawlogs, but forests provide more than wood.  Forests and other ecosystems provide services, such as recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen, that are difficult or impossible to duplicate technologically.

By some estimates, these services are worth $36 trillion per year—roughly equal to the output of the entire world economy. That is, if you can put a price on breathing. In economic lingo, the marginal cost of GDP may now exceed its marginal benefit.

In the American West this is becoming increasingly apparent. New developments impose greater costs on infrastructure and community services than those developments pay for in taxes.

In Larimer County and Fort Collins, residents are realizing this. Fort Collins has a growth management plan that will cap its size at 223,000 people.  For the most part, this is because the city can only provide water for that many people. In Colorado, freshwater is a resource with no reasonable substitutes.

Larimer County residents have twice voted to levy a ¼-cent sales tax increase to fund the open lands program. It is an investment in smarter growth, the type of growth we need.

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) adjusts GDP for environmental degradation, loss of natural capital and other costs of growth. It shows a steady decline in America for the past 30 years. Adopting GPI as an index for social welfare can put an end to this uneconomic growth.

In the words of Bill McKibben, More and Better were once two birds perched in the same tree. Better has flown away, but we are still aiming for More.

Between contradictory poll numbers, rumors of death panels and town hall shouting matches, the debate on health care reform is unraveling.

Everybody has a poll proving that a “clear majority” of Americans agree with their position on the public option. Obviously somebody has bad numbers, right?

A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll asked Americans if it was important to give people a choice of both a public and private plan for their health insurance.  A resounding 72 percent though it was.

The same poll asked a different group if they favor or oppose a public health care plan that would compete with private health insurance companies (emphasis added). Now, only 48 percent favored a public health care plan. The word “compete” changed the results completely.

Changes in the wording and question order of polls can influence how respondents feel about health care reform. This inconsistency suggests that people do not have strong opinions on a public option, or that the majority of Americans do not know enough to answer without being swayed by nuances in the questions.

(The most recent Rasmussen poll showed that only 42 percent support the recently-released House plan, for what it’s worth.)

Our uncertainty is understandable.  The 1,990 page House plan is not light reading, and there is a lot of competing information out there.

There is a lot of disinformation, too.

As revealed by Tim Dickinson in the September issue of Rolling Stone, the multi-million dollar disinformation industry is up and running again.

If you’ve been exposed to the disinformation industry in the past, you won’t be surprised to hear that it all ties back to tobacco company Phillip Morris.  (I covered it before in my column Manufacturing doubt a multi-million dollar industry, 4/14/09.)

Betsy McCaughey is the legislation expert that introduced the nation to death panels—bureaucrats that aim to deny life-sustaining treatment to the elderly.  Health care reform would be financed by “shortening your mother or father’s life,” she proclaimed.

McCaughey was central to the demise of health care reform proposed under President Bill Clinton.

In her 1994 article for The New Republic called “No Exit,” she alleged that Clinton’s plan would prevent Americans from going outside of the system to purchase health coverage, despite provisions in the bill explicitly stating otherwise.  The article was later recanted by The New Republic.

An internal memo of Phillip Morris claimed that they had worked with McCaughey on the article and two others that were published in the Wall Street Journal. (Phillip Morris stood to lose from Clinton’s plan because it was partly funded by a big increase in tobacco taxes.)

That same memo also stated that the company paid the group Citizens for a Sound Economy to create a “grassroots” movement to portray Clinton’s plan as a “government-run health care system replete with higher taxes…rationing of care and extensive bureaucracies.”

Sound familiar?

Citizens for a Sound Economy resurfaced to oppose the new health care reform as two different groups: Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. These groups helped orchestrate the first Tea Parties and town hall protests. Working with these groups was another, Conservatives for Patient Rights, founded by the former CEO of Columbia/HCA, the world’s largest hospital conglomerate.

Phillip Morris and other tobacco companies, while fighting a growing body of evidence that linked smoking to cancer, set up an industry of public relations masterminds and top political strategists that get paid big to manipulate public opinion anytime large corporations stand to lose from a change in the status quo.

Now every time we’re ankle-deep in progress, some half-wit with a Hitler effigy jumps up and starts shouting invectives across the room. These people don’t know it, but most of what they are shouting was scripted in focus groups and PR offices.  The American public is being lobbied without even realizing it.

Public option or no, we can all agree health care needs reform.  If we continue to let corporations dictate the terms of debate, any and all progress in America can be considered dead on arrival.

Read on:

Betsy McCaughey received large donations from the tobacco industry in her campaign for lieutenant governor of New York, as evidenced by this campaign donation thank you letter.

Frank Luntz is again writing the propaganda playbook for Republicans. For the uninitiated, see my column Manufacturing doubt a multimillion dollar industry, 4/14/09

Watch Betsy McCaughey try to defend her position to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show

Update: The Wall Street Journal has given McCaughey a platform to again tell us exactly what the health care bill ‘says.’  It’s simply outrageous.