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Comment by jamesbritt | Hacker News Reader

FTFA:

'A BBC Panorama documentary, "Bottled Water: Who Needs It?", to be broadcast tomorrow says that in terms of production, a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.'

And?

How much CO2 does a liter of tap water generate, and of all the ways I could reduce C02 generation, where does bottled water fit in?

Does the use of bottled water create more C02 than, say, raising farm animals for consumption?

Is it more harmful than printing newspapers? Reading Web sites?

This is not to argue for or against drinking bottled water, just that the choice of battles to fight seems goofy.

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You know, the questions you're asking are valid. But one might well ask "When there are other sources of clean, potable water available, why is it necessary, or even desirable, to drink water imported all the way from Fiji." Is Fijian water qualitatively that much better than it justifies the relatively monumental effort of transporting it to Manhattan for consumption?

I certainly won't deny that there are trendoids who glom onto this sort of thing as the latest cause célèbre, but to pass it off (as some commenters are doing) as mere trendy moralism or yet another "cause" repugnant to whatever brand of libertarianism is hip this month, is to ignore valid questions about the justice and justifiability of your actions.

Well I'm going to do my part to save the environment. I'll cycle to work; thus eating more food and respiring less efficiently and producing more CO2. I'll also eat more healthily, get more greens in me and protein; thus producing more methane which is 25 times worse than CO2 emissions.

Also, for when I do need to drive, I'll switch to a hybrid. However, that requires a large amount of lead and acids that are extremely harmful to the environment and it also takes more energy to produce an hybrid car than is actually saved in the average use of the car.

I will personally help destroy the environment by doing EVERYTHING I've been told should SAVE IT. I fucking love irony!

Contrary to what I suspect was your intent, you aren't being clever. You're just reinforcing the point that every choice has consequences...some intended, some not. For instance, the net increase in CO2 from your "cycle to work" respiration would, I suspect, be less damaging than the total net consequences of building, maintaining and driving a car. It'd be cheaper, too. Eating more greens might well make you fart more, though that's less than certain, but it would surely be less than the methane produced by the beef cattle that less-healthy eaters consume so voluminously.

Perhaps with some expansion, your reply could have made a serious contribution. Instead, it comes off looking glib.

"I certainly won't deny that there are trendoids who glom onto this sort of thing as the latest cause célèbre, but to pass it off (as some commenters are doing) as mere trendy moralism or yet another "cause" repugnant to whatever brand of libertarianism is hip this month, is to ignore valid questions about the justice and justifiability of your actions."

Quite true. My main issue was with the scant detail in the article, which assumes the reader should simply accept the proclamation of harm.

Had the article focused more on the more important matter of taking responsibility for the extended consequences of one's actions it would be harder to be dismissed out of hand.

Better results may be gained by provoking some introspection than by taking the moral high ground and attempting to shame people into acting a certain way. Even if shame works, the behavior is less likely to stick around.

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