Recent Rantings on Bottled Water, Climate Change
This article by Nigel Cox summarizes everything that is wrong with bottled water. On the one hand it turns into a branded status symbol – what kind of a society accepts it to FedEx a case of a certain brand of bottled water across a continent? On the other hand more and more people lack access to drinking water.
And in Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water than it is for most people in Fiji.
At the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills, where the rooms start at $500 a night and the guest next door might well be an Oscar winner, the minibar in all 196 rooms contains six bottles of Fiji Water. Before Fiji Water displaced Evian, Diet Coke was the number-one-selling minibar item. Now, says Christian Boyens, the Peninsula’s elegant director of food and beverage, “the 1 liter of Fiji Water is number one. Diet Coke is number two. And the 500-milliliter bottle of Fiji is number three.”
Some people still discuss if global warming is happening. Other people reckognize that something in fact is happening (this sometimes results in headlines as “2007 seen as second warmest year as climate shifts“) and maybe discuss how to minimize detrimental effects. Some look at the soil and how it is farmed, and come to at least interesting conclusions. Still other people think how this could be advantageous. It could be quite advantageous for professionals trained in water!
And still other people blame the gay.
On the topic of climate change, the protocol from the recent G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, is an interesting read, especially paragraphs 40 to 61.