Wisconsin hosted a Great Lakes governors' energy summit this week that produced lofty promises to coordinate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

A few hours later, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation released the schedule to spend a record-setting $1.9 billion to add another north-south traffic lane on I-94 between the Mitchell interchange near the airport for 35 miles south to the Illinois state line.

So we're inducing more driving at a time of record oil prices, knowing that driving releases greenhouse gases?

And we're spending this money on highway expansion based on gasoline costing $2.30 a gallon, when today's price is more than 25% higher and only going higher?

And the funding sources for this giant sop to road-builders aren't even nailed down, as Gretchen Schuldt points out on her blog?

These contradictions make a mockery of the Governors' energy summit and the state's commitment to sound fiscal and environmental stewardship.

According to one business writer, water sales from our region to Texas and beyond are predictable and calculable.

And separately, the Chief Executive of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange thinks there could soon be a lucrative market in trading futures contracts to deliver bulk water.

With billions of dollars to be made from very willing (parched) buyers, are the pending Great Lakes Compact and existing, but relatively weak US Water Resources Development Act effective enough to prevent such sales?

Will the Wisconsin legislature move forward and ratify the Compact, or will it continue to be cowed by anti-regionalists like State Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin), who, along with states' rights allies in Ohio, torpedo the Compact and make bulk water exports away from the Great Lakes even easier?

There are analysts in Canada, according to this website posting from north of the border, that have looked at their nation's natural resource use for various exports to the US and don't like what they see.

Note the linkage to the production and export of Canadian tar sand crude oil - - a process that uses substantial amounts of water, which like oil is also a finite resource.

And the tar sands provide the crude oil that will supply the expanded refining capacity on the US Great Lakes at Whiting, Indiana (British Petroleum) and Superior, Wisconsin (Murphy Oil).

It takes three gallons of water to produce a barrel of crude oil for export, with polluted wastewater to deal with in Canada, experts say.

Then it takes more water to refine that crude oil, and produces more waste that has to be dealt with by the refinery - - on the Great Lakes.