James Lileks comments on the ritualized response coming from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom upon being caught with bottled water. Bottled water! How unenlightened, declasse and antigreen.

This sums up with exquisite precision the people we elect to guide our institutions:

Fix on something small and symbolic, and demonize it;

Propose a response that does little to address the fundamental problem;

Forbid the thing to others;

Reserve its use for yourself;

Adopt a penitent tone when caught which underscores the hypocrisy and makes you look like a dweeb for apologizing for something which, while petty, you have infused with moral failings. 

I’m not big on shouting HYPOCRITE, for the most part, because failing to do a thing you   endorse does not mean the thing you’re endorsing isn’t a good idea. But that equation changes when it’s something they want to take away from you, but reserve for themselves. In any case, it’s just laughable to see a weightless fool who, for the sake of public image and sending the right messages,  has to apologize for having the wrong kind of water container  - and has an aide describe it as an indulgence.

Sir. Six oysters for breakfast with a rasher of bacon is an indulgence. Three showgirls in your lap is an indulgence. Racing a car at high speed on weekends is an indulgence. Having a moral tuning fork that twinges when someone drinks water from a plastic bottle is an affectation. 

Today, bottled water. Tomorrow, who knows what will be on the list of socially accepatable goods? Some other perfectly normal product that people buy because they want to.

Actually, might be a fun little guessing game. Pate de foie gras is evil. Products with transfats, verboten. Bottled water, eeek!

Our guess: Ice cream that uses carrageenan, demonized because of the harm caused to ocean life in the harvesting of seaweed. Birds, fish and phytoplankton are traumatized.

Given the anti-consumer, anti-choice, anti-hydration tirades that the Know Betters are leading around the country, we thought it might informative to note that bottled water has a long and proud history in this nation.

Why, a salt-deprived Sgt. Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police Department (Badge 714) was even singing Poland Water’s praises back in the early ’50s. His exact quote: “That’s good water.” Endorsements come no stronger.

That’s a clip from “The Big False Make,” first broadcast May 27, 1954. Downloaded from the great public domain site, Archive.org.

Elsewhere in bottled water news, H2O-lier-than-thou Mayor Newsom of San Francisco is proved to like the convenience of the product after all. From the SF Gate’s City Insider column, “Newsom sneaking around and sipping out of a bottle?”

This week, the City Insider spotted an almost empty case of bottled water in the back of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s hybrid sport utility vehicle as it was parked in front of City Hall. At least one full bottle of Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water remained under the plastic covering.

This from the mayor who in June 2007 issued an executive order directing city government to no longer purchase bottled water, saying the containers clog landfills while the city owns a pristine reservoir in the Sierra Nevada that produces some of the country’s best-rated tap water.

Newsom, a former restaurateur, last year called on the restaurant industry to stop selling bottled water to customers and start serving local tap water instead.

Because of that, the mayor generally declines bottled water at any event or meeting, lest he be photographed with an offending bottle.

His explanation this time? It was for my security detail. Yeah, that’s it, my security detail. Here, let me introduce you to its lead officer, Sgt. Joe Friday.

(Hat tip: WAMU’s The Big Broadcast, which broadcast the radio version of “The Big False Make” last Sunday.)

From Legal Newsline, “Nestle cancels bottling contract in seek of ‘clean slate’“:

McCLOUD, Calif. (Legal Newsline)-The largest distributor of bottled water has cancelled its contract with the McCloud Community Services District to build a manufacturing plant on the banks of the pristine McCloud River.

In a letter sent via overnight courier to the city on Friday, Nestle’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel Mark Evans wrote that recent changes in the scope and size of the project has led to the decision in the hopes that both sides can “start with a clean slate and build an agreement that reflects the current circumstances.

“We believe that is best that we step out of the existing contract and start a new,” Evans wrote.

The news follows a threat by Attorney General Jerry Brown to sue the bottled water company because of its potential environmental impact on the McCloud River, the amount of fossil fuels required to produce and ship plastic bottles, and the amount of water the existing contract allowed the company to remove from the river each year.

An environmental scold with unlimited ambition and unfettered powers. Jerry Brown knows better than you.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Subcommittee on Transportation Safety, Infrastructure Security, and Water Quality held a hearing yesterday, “Quality and Environmental Impacts of Bottled Water.”

Anti-market environmental scolds have gained some political purchase in making bottled water one of their major targets among consumer goods, attacking the packaging, the processing, the costs and the image. Joining them in the critique are municipal government types, seeking leverage to increase taxes and fees to pay for city services.

Motivating this attack and giving it sex appeal for the media is the sense of indignation. “Pay for water? Why, why…Harumph.”

But do we really want a society where an offended elite is able to pick and choose which consumer products the public can buy? More than we already do?

From the testimony of Joseph Doss, President and CEO of the International Bottled Water Association:

Bottled water is a safe, convenient, healthful packaged beverage product that consumers find refreshing and use to stay hydrated. In many instances, consumers choose bottled water because it does not have the calories, caffeine, or other ingredients that they may wish to eliminate or moderate in their diets. And with the rise in obesity and diabetes in the United States, any actions that discourage the consumption of bottled water are not in the public interest.

Diabetes, eh? Well, Mr. Doss knows the game, obviously, and his prepared testimony is quite thorough, responding effectively point by point to the criticisms of the industry from the environmental scolds and municipal taxers.  And he alludes to the argument we find most compelling when he calls bottled water a “consumer-driven market.”

That is to say…

“I like bottled water. I’m willing to buy it. It’s not illegal. So why in the world is the Senate spending its time ‘investigating’ the industry?”

Or anything else that offends the globally attuned sensitivities of California’s attorney general. Get in Jerry Brown’s way, you will be sued!

State Attorney General Jerry Brown today warned Siskiyou County officials that they’ll face legal challenges if Nestle doesn’t address global warming in its plans to build a bottling plant in McCloud.

Citing environmental and global warming concerns in a letter to the Siskiyou County planning department, Brown said that Nestle Waters North America needs to revise its contract with the county to bottle water, even though the firm recently announced it would downsize its original plans.

“It takes massive quantities of oil to produce plastic water bottles and to ship them in diesel trucks across the United States,” Brown said in a statement. “Nestle will face swift legal challenge if it does not fully evaluate the environmental impact of diverting millions of gallons of spring water from the McCloud River into billions of plastic water bottles.”

So you can see where business might be leery of expanded authority for attorneys general in legislation, like, oh, the new CPSC bill.

Forget questions of effective city administration, infrastructure or taxes, mayors just want to fix the environment!

First we have the silly finger-wagging about bottled water.

And now a resolution from the U.S. Conference of Mayors telling the Canadians just to keep their dirty, dirty oil.

As a Calgary Sun columnist notes, “Considering that by 2020, Alberta’s oilsands will pump four-million barrels of oil a day — about a quarter of total current U.S. oil consumption, it could prove challenging and costly for these high-minded local politicians to find a separate spigot that will deliver only non-oilsands based fuel to their vehicle fleets.”

The package of resolutions adopted at the Miami meeting of mayors runs for 280 pages! No wonder the mayors want to preserve the Canadian northern arboreal forests from the ravages of oil sands extraction. They need to pulp the trees for paper instead.

P.S. 280 pages!

(Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.)