The telling point--the most telling point--is this quote:
"Phil Woolas, the environment minister, added that the amount of money spent on mineral water 'borders on being morally unacceptable'." [emphasis mine. as usual.]
It's "morally unacceptable" for people to choose to spend their money on bottled water? Morally unacceptable? Who the hell does that jerkoff think he is?
He thinks, obviously, that he's smarter than everyone else and that he knows better than the hoi polloi, the vulgate, what they should spend their money on.
The entire issue is ludicrous, anyway. People want to buy bottled water to drink because they don't trust the stuff that comes from their taps. They want water that they know is clean and pure.
So the government of Great Britain is trying to get people to stop buying bottled water, because it causes global warming. "...in terms of production, a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water."
How much carbon dioxide is "generated" by a liter of tap water? I notice the article doesn't give us a number. 600 times an infinitesimal number is still going to be small, and I'd wager that the aggregate amount of "bottled water carbon dioxide" probably wouldn't even come to as much carbon as is released by Hanukkah candles.
* * *
And, by the way, I was off by three orders of magnitude in that linked post. Earth's annual carbon budget is not 206 million tons of carbon. It is 206 BILLION tons. The human component of that is still three percent--about 6.5 billion tons. Which means that lighting one less candle at Hanukkah would result in human carbon emissions of 6,499,999,985 instead of 6,500,000,000. That's a saving of 0.0000002% of all man-made carbon emissions.