water exports

Over the last however any years, British Columbia has been debating water exports with any number of people who applied for permits to fill tankers and send then off to a thirsty world. Most of these proposals involve parking the tanker near an ocean terminating river, hooking up a pipe to the supply and driving away when the tanker is full. When the tanker shows up where thirst guys are, the water is traded for money and off they go for another load.
I always thought of these schemes as a license to print money and well worth pursuing, but lo-and-behold was I in for a surprise. A cacophony of voices howled in protest, the loudest belonging to Maude Barlow. All sorts of reasons have been aired to prevent the export of water, and to me none of them make any real sense as we're talking about water that simply flows into the ocean. Does it make any difference to the ocean if the water makes a trip to California before it finally reaches the oceans? The water still makes it into the ocean sometime.
However, after some serious discussion over a couple of beer, we did figured out what the problem was - pollution. Think of this from a 'green' perspective. Here we have a product being shipped on the open ocean and, heaven forbid, the loaded tanker strikes an empty returning tanker and we now have an enormous spill. The true environmentalist recognizes the near impossibility of cleaning up the polluting spill. Now a normal human being might say water is water, what's the big deal, but that isn't how the environmental mind works. In their minds the water in the tanker has become a pollutant - the reason - its' been tainted with the profit motive.
Now you might think this is far-fetched and I'm seeing double ogres, but hear me out. As a example, think of Yellowstone National Park. Day after day, thousands of gallons of sulfur laden water bubble up out of the earth and, doing what gravity tells it top do, flows over the earth, into the Missouri river then the Mississippi and on to the gulf of Mexico.
Now if you had a business and dropped a tablespoon of sulfuric acid into the same river system the EPA would have a conniption. The local Sierra Club would write letters of condemnation and launch a lawsuit to get loot to cover everybody's perceived damages. The school teachers would get the eight years olds 'go public' with their newly learned anxieties. The television crew will be out in force filming geriatricly expired fish and claiming sulfur poisoning.
All it took was a couple of beer to finally see that to the goofy green environmentalist, profit = pollution. And Ben Franklin was right when he said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy".