THE PEOPLE of Greater Boston will not even lift a finger to turn on the stove to boil water.
. So begins Derrick Jackson this morning, in a Boston Globe column titled Boil, baby, boil, in which he yet again reminds us of the ridiculous cost of bottled water. Boston is now off the boil water alert that panicked the bean town metro area for several days. People walked several miles, or took taxis.
The Globe reported sellouts of bottled water at BJ’s, Stop & Shop, and Star Market, and long lines for bottled water at CVS, Walgreens, and Trader Joes. The National Guard was called out to distribute bottled water. Water "refugees’’ scrolled the Internet on cellphones to find open coffee shops. One man was so desperate for coffee that he bounced around to five coffee shops before giving up to go home for some instant coffee.
And why? Because they were so unwilling to boil water? Why?
Jackson has boiled more than his share of pond water, on scout camping trips and family wilderness adventures, over the past 30 years. The sensible thing, he points out, would have been for people to stay home and boil water.
Consider:
Tap water costs a fraction of a cent. According to National Grid spokeswoman Debbie Drew, the company’s energy efficiency team estimates that it costs roughly 20 cents a gallon to boil water for two minutes with gas and 43 cents a gallon with electricity.
This contrasts to the ridiculous prices for bottled water, most of which is tap anyway. The Environmental Working Group says the national average of a gallon of bottled water is $3.79, or 1,900 times the cost of tap water. The Government Accountability Office last year estimated that the energy cost of bottling water into plastic containers and transporting it is up to 2,000 times the energy cost of tap water in Los Angeles. One woman featured in the Globe had a 1-liter bottle that cost $3.29. That is $13 a gallon, or 65 times the cost of boiling tap water by gas.
Let's repeat -
bottled water averages 1,900 times the cost of tap water
in Los Angeles, energy cost of bottling and transporting is up to 2,000 time the energy cost of tap water.
a one liter bottle, at $13/gallon, is 65 times the cost of boiling tap water
Jackson has written about the ridiculous cost of bottled water in the past. I have written about his columns on the topic.
Today Jackson offers a comparison with the willingness of Americans to change behavior as we have on tobacco products, to the great improvement in the health of Americans, I might add. But we are still obsessed with the idea, quoted by Neva Goodwin from Dana Meadows, of filling immaterial needs with material goods.
As a teacher of social studies, I am supposed to teach my students the basics of economics. Yet no where in our curricular materials do we ever address the costs of energy usage. No where are we instructed to inform our students of how to calculate the hidden costs of environmental damage that result from how we produce things, whether the production of energy (the Gulf Coast being one example, mountaintop removal for coal being another), or the production of food (soil erosion, water consumption, and the like). I wonder if our people were truly economically literate whether our consumption patterns might in fact change. Of course if they did, there would be severe economic impact upon some corporate interests, which will certainly oppose teachers instructing students in a way that might jeopardize their profits. We would be accused of socialism or worse.
It is not only the economics of bottled water. If we cannot understand that and act appropriately, when will we address the ridiculousness of limiting the damages to which companies like BP are subject as a result of the oil drilling for which a failure can have catastrophic consequences: remember, for this episode legally BP's exposure is $75 million, this despite the amount of damage that occurred in Santa Barbara in 1969 (an episode that helped lead to Earth Day) or with the Exxon Valdez in 1989.
Perhaps, you might say, that it is appropriate for government to step in in order to provide a safety cushion so that business interests will take the risk of providing us with the energy resources we need. Oil is not alone. In the nuclear energy industry, there is the Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act in which the liability for an incident at a nuclear plant is tiered: privately obtained insurance covers the first $375 million, the next $10 billion comes from a pool to be paid into by industry producers (and that money does not necessarily have to be prepaid but can be collected at the time of an incident) and anything above that is covered by us - legally, the act says by the Federal government, but that is us, you and me, since the largest single source of revenue for the federal government is the personal income tax.
We do need an energy policy. We do need to account for all costs. Industry should be held liable for damage that it might cause, and if the risks are so great that the insurance industry is unwilling to cover it - as is the case for nuclear power plants - then we truly need to ask whether it is appropriate to proceed with that technology. And if it is appropriate, then perhaps this is something that should be funded and operated on a non-profit basis by the federal taxpayers so that we can insist on proper safety measures and full accounting of all costs, including costs of damage to the environment.
Bottled water. An offshore drilling platform whose failure has had catastrophic consequences. They are related. If you go to the store to buy bottled water, you are using petroleum. You may do so by driving. The water certainly at some point was trucked. Perhaps petroleum was not used for the purification (if such was done) and bottling. If the bottle is plastic, there is additional petroleum involved in the production of the bottle.
And beyond the petroleum, the electricity might be being produced by coal, which might mean Massey is making a profit, at the expense of the lives of miners and the destruction of communities.
Where can we make a difference? We can start by educating ourselves and others to the real costs of the decisions we make.
If we have the gift of words, as does Derrick Jackson, we can use that gift to education others. If not, we can certainly pass on his. As I am doing.
I began with Jackson, so I will end with Jackson, as he ends:
The panic betrays how much a prisoner we are to the immaterial. A woman who paid $52.92 for a case of bottled water at a 7-Eleven in Jamaica Plain told the Globe, "I was kind of, like, shocked. And then I thought, ‘There’s no water.’ ’’
There has been water all along. We are just too lazy to boil it.
We are just too lazy to boil it if we stay lazy, those words might be used as an epitaph.
I think Jackson has it right: rather than "Drill, baby, drill" we would be far better off saying Boil, baby, boil.
Peace.