In public policy affairs, just as in private or business ones, it is important to balance the time and resources expended to achieve some goal with the value of the goal itself. Economists call this benefit-cost analysis. But it boils down to a simple rule: Don’t sweat the small stuff.
Some of my fellow environmentalists need to learn that basic rule. Regardless of what symbolic importance some issue may have to you personally, if the average intelligent layperson finds the objective facts render your stand silly, you have wasted time and energy that could have gone into issues of true importance.
There are few better examples of this inability to set priorities than the insistence by a few environmentalists — and a few politicians who must be deluded or highly cynical — that the Great Lakes are open to looting as long as there is no statutory provision banning the production of bottled water within the Great Lakes Basin.
The Great Lakes/St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement, signed by eight U.S. states, including Minnesota, and two Canadian provinces went into effect in October. It includes useful provisions for coordination among these states and provinces on water-resource matters but also represents a large dose of populist paranoia about “furriners” coming to steal our water.
An aborted 1998 proposal to export 158 million gallons of water to Asia started the whole kerfuffel, and so the agreement bans shipping water from the basin in any containers larger than 5.7 U.S. gallons. This exempts the small containers used for most consumer bottled water. This exemption, activists say, leaves the door open for the rest of the nation, nay the whole world, to solve its water shortages by buying Dasani or Aquafina sucked out of one of the five lakes or the myriad rivers that flow into them.
T. Boone Pickens’ purchase of southwestern U.S. water rights and past vague proposals to ship supertankers of Great Lakes water to Asia have been brandished as evidence of imminent water grabs. But does allowing bottled-water companies to operate in the basin constitute a real threat to the ecosystem or economy of the region?
The Great Lakes do not contain a fixed quantity of fossil water like the Ogallala aquifer and other low-recharge aquifers in the south and west. The lakes are part of the ongoing hydrological cycle of rainfall, runoff and stream flows into and out of lakes and eventually to the ocean. Evaporation and transpiration along the route add to atmospheric moisture that eventually precipitates as new rain.
Water flows into the Great Lakes every day and water flows out. The magnitude of these outflows puts the danger of water bottling into perspective. The average flow of the Niagara River that carries most of the flow from Lake Erie, the fourth lake in the chain, to Lake Ontario, the last, is 204,000 cubic feet per second.
That is about 91 million gallons, or 380,000 tons, per minute. Filling a one-pint bottle of water for every single American from Puerto Rico to Hawaii would take about 25 seconds. Filling the 158 million gallon export proposed a decade ago would take a minute and 45 seconds. Filling 50 100,000-ton tankers would take 13 minutes.
If filling two bottles of water for all Americans each day would consume only 3/100ths of 1 percent, not of the volume of the water in the lakes, but of their daily outflow to the Atlantic, it will be hard to convince even environmentally concerned voters that such bottling presents a clear and present danger to the health of the Great Lakes. It is time for activists, and for politicians who have been riding this hobbyhorse too long, to turn to more important matters.
© 2009 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.