Michigan is not lacking in water, and 1.1 million of gallons a day is pretty much a drop in a bucket. Like Michigan loses 10 000 times as much every day due to evaporation, for example.
Surface evaporations is largely from water that is easily replenished on a relatively short timescale. Pumping groundwater at too high rates irreversibly decreases the groundwater reservoir capacity and even if it doesn’t, can take ages to replenish.
It's typically considered a “Midwestern” state (a term which is kind of odd with the modern boundaries, since the “Midwest” is in the northern half of the country running, on the east-west axis, from the central part of the continental US fairly far to the east.)
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.001*5gallons+in+tabl...
Anyway, even if the referenced "drop" is accurate, it's not like the evaporated water only rains down in Wisconsin or Indiana.
As I said, 1 million gallons of water evaporates from Lake Michigan every 10 seconds. That’s the deal: where water is abundant, it’s really abundant.
Almost all of the cost of municipal water, for example, is from building and maintaining the distribution system. In non-arid areas, there almost never is any shortage of water at the source, and water pricing is priced per use not because it costs that much to “produce it” or because the reservoirs are running short, but rather to limit the use so that there is no need to expand water carrying infrastructure.
If Nestle is building its own infrastructure, and the water is so abundant that there is absolutely no risk of it running anywhere close to short, why should the government or people care? Suppose Nestle builds a farm of windmills, that slows down a million gallons of moving air by 20 miles per hour every day. To be sure, they would be using up large amounts of natural resource, the wind energy. Should they pay significant fees for the privilege? I don’t think so; that would be completely ludicrous.
There are of course circumstances where Nestle should pay more. For example, if they were using water coming from government built and maintained infrastructure, or if the water was not so abundant as it is in Michigan. For example, if they were pulling it from deep aquifer that’s depleting faster than its refilling, as it is the case in many places of arid Southwest. But, to my knowledge, none of this is the case for Nestle in Michigan.
1 million acre feet is a pretty small amount in comparison to most industrial or agricultural uses.
The common unit of water usage is acrefeet 1 million gallons is ~ 3 acrefeet
California wine production uses 667,000 acre*feet per year. [1] California total agricultural uses 24,500,000 acre feet per year [2]
3/24.5 million =0.00000012
https://aic.ucdavis.edu/publications/Economic%20wine%20and%2... https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2019/2017C...
These rules are the same for farmers, industrial users (like car manufacturers), nestle, or you and me.
They do contribute back through taxes, including income tax their employees pay directly to the state of Michigan. If they aren't paying enough, I think reforming corporate taxation is a better solution than arbitrarily taxing extraction of a plentiful resource out of dislike for the extractors. Hopefully that doesn't make me some kind of anarcho-capitalist nut.
I don't agree. All it means is that they're benefiting privately from something that belongs to everyone. This is particularly glaring in this case because Nestle has a history of unethical behavior - for example, there is a plausible argument that one of the reasons why the Flint lead problem hasn't been fixed is because of profits on bottled water. Taxation is not a perfect solution because the government doesn't always use the funds ethically, particularly when it is in bed with corporations. But it's better than nothing.
> The amount of water they're pumping really isn't that significant compared to agricultural or industrial users.
Then why not have them pay a use fee that is proportionally small compared to agricultural and industrial users? If we don't charge them at all then logically why can't they just go ahead and privatize the entire water supply for the cost of $200? Natural resources shouldn't be made arbitrarily available for private profit.
ahhhh my sweet summer child........