Only 24 trillion? Seemed like more this year.
The don’t-drink-a-drop crowd is fond of claiming that water is Maine’s equivalent of oil, a valuable natural resource we should conserve against the day there isn’t enough to go around. But as former state geologist Walter Anderson pointed out in a column he wrote for the Maine Sunday Telegram earlier this year, “Not selling the water does not keep it in the ground for future use. This is spring water, and it is constantly discharging and running into the ocean.”
Selling it might prevent the flooding of our coastal cities.
One more point about water extraction: It’s already regulated by the state. And those regulations were jointly drafted by the water industry and leaders of H2O For ME, a group that’s run a couple of failed referendum campaigns to slap new taxes on bottled water. In newspaper interviews, H2O leader Jim Wilfong, a former legislator, once called Maine law “weak, outmoded and inadequate,” but later said the 2007 revision — which instituted a more thorough permitting process, better watershed management, and set sustainability standards — was “a firm foundation of groundwater law on which to build.”
That’s “build,” as in “not tear down.” Forcing Poland Spring to look outside the state for water sources, because the wet-behind-the-ears gang cares nothing for facts, threatens 800 good jobs at its Maine operations. If they go, it’ll hardly matter whether we close down the breweries.
Nobody will be able to afford beer, anyway.
If you can’t drown your sorrows, you can e-mail them to me at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
