We need to Ban Fracking now. and implement a Residential and Commercial Feed in Tariff, and terminate Nestle water contracts, to address our Water and Energy Problems. Brenna Norton, Organizer for Food & Water Watch quoted in one of many print and TV stations that covered Wednesdays release of how much water the oil and gas industry is wasting and permanently polluting in California. In this time of drought, our water is just too precious, Norton told CBS Los Angeles. We cant have two million gallons a day that can never reenter the water cycle. The oil industry in CA is currently polluting over 2 million gallons of water each day due to fracking, acidizing and cyclic steam injection. By comparison, about 20,000 California homeowners use this much water in a day! 3 -6 million gallons of drinkable water is used with Trade Secret Protected Toxic Chemicals ,for each well. Depleting a Precious Resource Nestlé has two plants on the Colorado River Basin that take in water to bottle and sell under its Arrowhead and Pure Life brands. One is in Salida, Colorado, on the eastern edge of the Upper Basin; the other is in the San Gorgonio Pass, halfway between San Bernardino and Indio, Calif., on the western edge of the Lower Basin. According to annual reports filed up to 2009, Nestlé bottles between 595 and 1,366 acre-feet of water per year – enough to flood that many acres under a foot of water – from the California source. The company takes 200 additional acre-feet per year from the Colorado source. This means altogether Nestlé is draining the Colorado River Basin of anywhere from 250 million to 510 million gallons of water per year, according to the acre-feet-to-gallons conversion calculator. The Colorado River Basin is an especially critical water resource, responsible for supplying municipal water to 40 million Americans and irrigating 5.5 million acres of land. As the US Bureau of Reclamation has documented, 22 federally-recognized tribes, seven national wildlife refuges, four national recreation areas, and 11 national parks depend on the basin. In a new report by NASA and the University of California at Irvine, researchers discovered that between December of 2004 and November of 2013, the basin lost 53 million acre-feet of water. 41 million acre-feet, or 75 percent of that loss, came from groundwater sources, like those pumped by Nestlé. That’s more than twice the amount of water contained in Lake Mead, America’s largest freshwater reservoir. In the meantime, Nestlé, with 29 water bottling facilities across North America, pocketed $4 billion in revenue from bottled water sales in 2012 alone. Carl Gibson
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 01:04:16 +0000
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