Rush makes the case that bottled water is more harmful to the environment than oil:

“All right, I have some of the most hilarious and revealing stories in our global warming stack today. From the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, story by Jared Blumenfeld and Susan Leal. Listen to this. San Franciscans and other Bay Area residents enjoy some of the nation’s highest quality drinking water, with pristine Sierra snowmelt from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir as our primary source. Every year, our water is tested more than 100,000 times to ensure that it meets or exceeds every standard for safe drinking water. And yet we still buy bottled water. Why? Maybe it’s because we think bottled water is cleaner and somehow better, but that’s not true. The federal standards for tap water are higher than those for bottled water. The Environmental Law Foundation has sued eight bottlers for using words such as “pure” to market water that contains bacteria, arsenic and chlorine. Bottled water is no bargain either: It costs 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water. For the price of one bottle of Evian, a San Franciscan can receive 1,000 gallons of tap water.

Now, stop and think of this. For the price of one bottle of Evian, a San Franciscan can receive 1,000 gallons of tap water. Forty percent of bottled water should be labeled bottled tap water because that is exactly what it is. Clearly, the popularity of bottled water is the result of huge marketing efforts. The global consumption of bottled water reached 41 billion gallons in 2004, up 57 percent in just five years. Even in areas where tap water is clean and safe to drink, such as in San Francisco, demand for bottled water is increasing. Most of the price of a bottle of water goes for its bottling, packaging, shipping, marketing, retailing and profit. Transporting bottled water by boat, truck and train involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. More than 5 trillion gallons of bottled water is shipped internationally each year. Here in San Francisco, we can buy water from Fiji (5,455 miles away) or Norway (5,194 miles away) and many other faraway places to satisfy our demand for the chic and exotic. These are truly the Hummers of our bottled-water generation. As further proof that the bottle is worth more than the water in it, starting in 2007, the state of California will give 5 cents for recycling a small water bottle and 10 cents for a large one.

This story goes on and on with statistics left and right designed to stop people from drinking bottled water on the theory that it is leading to global warming and on the theory that it is cheaper than tap — which it is. There’s no question. I’ve often felt sorry for the Big Oil guys. I mean, look at what they have to do to get oil and then turn it into refinable products, and look at what these bottled water guys have to do. They just have to go to a spring or somebody’s tap and turn it on, fill the bottle. There’s no R&D or nothing. It’s practically pure profit, but people think that it is safer. Anyway, these two people in San Francisco have gone into great detail here into expressing just how damaging to the environment bottled water is. You could make the case after reading this that it is causing more environmental damage than oil.”