Oh, I agree. I was just saying that there's "serious" and there's "serious"
http://www.greatlakeswaterwars.com/chapter11.htm says that it was a for-profit "humanitarian effort on behalf of the world’s poor that was also designed to make money".
I can't figure out how it was supposed to work. It looks like it comes down to person who wanted to do it was in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and thought of the tons of water in the backyard [paraphrasing]. So he and his partners could have been serious about, but there's no real chance it would work out.
It doesn't really matter what the prices were in 1997. Alaska water is closer to Asia than the Great Lakes. If it made sense for Lake Superior, it would make even more sense for water from the Sitka.
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/ind... says that around the same time :
> A company called Global Water Corp. has announced plans to ship up to 5 billion gallons a year of glacier water by tanker from Alaska, near the port city of Sitka, to the Middle East. The company said on its Internet web site that it has reached agreements with buyers in China, and that it plans to negotiate with interested parties in the southwest U.S.
There's a lot of people who talk, in the hopes that someone else will front the money. It's not really a con, because it might actually work. But if things are borderline, it can help to sound serious and express no doubts.