This is, dare I say it, among the most pathetic things I have ever heard of.

In the last few months, bottled water — generally considered a benign, even beneficial, product — has been increasingly portrayed as an environmental villain by city leaders, activist groups and the media. The argument centers not on water, but oil. It takes 1.5 million barrels a year just to make the plastic water bottles Americans use, according to the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, plus countless barrels to transport it from as far as Fiji and refrigerate it. ...

Dave Byers, 65, from Silver Spring, Md., discussed the issue with his wife, Pat, on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a 90-degree Saturday. “I think it should be banned, actually,” he said of bottled water.

Now, according to to this piece at Reason's Hit & Run blog, we use 20 million barrels of oil a day.

And if we take accepted figures that water bottles make up a whopping .02% of our oil consumption and plastic bags consume .16% of our oil, that makes up les than two-tenths of one percent of our oil consumption.

Assuming such bans would not require shifting to products that would consume any of the oil saved (a brainless assumption -- but hey, let's humor the acolytes of the cult of man-made global warming), that means our daily oil savings would be a whole 36 thousand barrels of oil a day -- or a bit over 13.1 million barrels of oil a year. In other words, the savings is less than 2/3 of one day's oil consumption. The total savings would have been consumed by the American public by 3:47 PM on January 1.

Yeah. Great job, folks.

OPEN TRACKBACKING AT Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Rosemary's Thoughts, DeMediacratic Nation, Big Dog's Weblog, Right Truth, Nuke's News & Views, Webloggin, The Amboy Times, The Bullwinkle Blog, Pursuing Holiness, Right Celebrity, third world county, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, Planck's Constant, The Pink Flamingo, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.