[Newsbot]

Title: U.S. firm sues Canada for $10.5 billion over water
Category: Environmental
Posted By: Zipperfish
Date: 2015-07-09 11:29:22
Canadian

[Zipperfish]

Sued for 10.5 Billion for not allowing "bulk freshwater exports." Meanwhile selling Nestle groundwater during drought for whopping price of $2.25 per million liters (witha $250 fine for regular folks if youa re caught watering your lawn).

[DrCaleb]

Ummm, from 1999? Is your internet connection that slow?

[Zipperfish]

EHRMAGERD! Slow Internet! ha ha ha. Someone posted this somewhere's else. New protocol--check date always.

[Alta_redneck]

Mine is a little faster.

$1:

Nestlé B.C. water deal too cheap, says NDP
Starting in 2016, corporations will be charged $2.25 for every one million litres of water they extract

By The Early Edition, CBC News Posted: Feb 20, 2015 1:12 PM PT Last Updated: Feb 20, 2015 1:12 PM PT.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-c ... -1.2964709

Here is something to compare this with, over here in Farmville, farmers need good clean water to mix with chemicals and spray their crops. The town here has a pay station for bulk water, and for a Million Liters of water it costs just under $12000.00, $2.25 per Million, really.

[BRAH]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Ummm, from 1999? Is your internet connection that slow?

[PublicAnimalNo9]

Saw a program on "The Water Brothers" that demonstrates part of this problem. Not the lawsuit but the fact that water is being treated as a commodity. Take Nestle for example. They take water, add no value to it and then put it in plastic bottles to be sold as a commodity, and yet the reality is, when you put water in plastic bottles like that, you devalue the water.

The fact that govts allow water to be exploited this way is a goddam crime, or at least bloody well should be.

[andyt]

Not at all. I like having bottled water to drink when you can't get cold tap water. The aquifer that Nestle is drawing from in BC is stable, ie inflow = outflow, so they're not taking water away from anything else. The problem is only that Nestle will, with the new, raised, rates, pay $2.25/1,000,000 liters. Ridiculously cheap. But then we don't charge say beer or pop makers any more, afaik. So seems to me the price of water should go up, but we need to ferociously guard against bulk water exports.

Maybe we could do a Newfoundland. Do whatever we want, and if NAFTA goes against us, it's the Feds that have to pay up, not the province.

[PublicAnimalNo9]

andyt andyt:

Not at all. I like having bottled water to drink when you can't get cold tap water. The aquifer that Nestle is drawing from in BC is stable, ie inflow = outflow, so they're not taking water away from anything else. The problem is only that Nestle will, with the new, raised, rates, pay $2.25/1,000,000 liters. Ridiculously cheap. But then we don't charge say beer or pop makers any more, afaik. So seems to me the price of water should go up, but we need to ferociously guard against bulk water exports.

Maybe we could do a Newfoundland. Do whatever we want, and if NAFTA goes against us, it's the Feds that have to pay up, not the province.

Beer and pop makers add value to the water. And in many cases the water is purer than tap water. Bottled water not so much. In fact 40% of the bottled water sold in Canada is just tap water.
Your argument about the aquifer that Nestle uses is somewhat erroneous. You're talking about taking water from a source that supplies a given local area and exporting it to millions of people outside of the area. At some point inflow will no longer be able to keep up with outflow. Besides, BC isn't the only place that Nestle has water bottling facilities.
Bottled water is a scourge in the West. In Toronto alone, their recycling stations receive about 700,000 plastic water bottles every day. Add in other plastic beverage containers and they're well over a million per day. That's just one city for one day.
That's also an awful lot of oil being pissed away for a "product" that costs you 1000 times more than what comes out of your tap at home.

Bottled water at best, should be a niche product in the West, not mass produced for mass consumerism. 80% of the morons out there who drink bottled water can't even taste the difference between tap and bottled water. Obviously there are exceptions as some municipal water supplies have nasty tasting water. Windsor and Cambridge Ontario come to mind. Oshawa's can be pretty funky depending on what part of town you live in.

The bottled water scourge is a problem that can be solved by people literally doing nothing extra or special, and they'd save themselves some money in the process.

[andyt]

Well, it's clear that Nestle is not selling tap water, hence the outcry. If they were using tap water, they would have to pay a lot more. When Vancouver was adding more chlorine to the water than they do now, I would only drink bottled water from spring sources. Our water has gone back to being very good now, so there's no need any more.

You seem to have no problem with beer and pop, yet shit on bottled water. I'd much rather drink water than those other drinks. They also leave bottles behind. At home I just keep containers of tap water in the fridge, but when I'm out and about and need something to drink, I'd much rather have water than pop. Restaurants aren't happy with me, because I have just water to drink.

I recall coming into Regina at midnight after driving from Salmon Arm. This was the 70's and I was used to our great VAncouver water. Went to the motel tap and have a drink and spew - tasted like garbage. In those days bottled water was unheard of, but if I lived in that hole, I'd certainly be drinking nothing but.

I'd like to know just what value you think pop adds to water. All that sugar? The CO2 that can rot your teeth? Seems to me that pop is just polluted water. I would say the same about beer, but recognize it's actually not a bad drink, I've just lost the taste for it. At least well brewed beer has some nutrients in it, and I sure miss it on a hot summer's day.

The bottled water fuss is just political correctness, with places banning it while continuing to sell other bottled drinks - so people drink those instead, much less healthy than drinking plain water.

[Zipperfish]

I think the bigger issue is the commodification of water. That was the reason there was such opposition to bulk exports. The fact that we're practically giving away our resources is nothing new. That's Canada's specialty, in fact.

[andyt]

WEll, water is already a commodity - used by all sorts of industries. As long as we keep that commodity at home, and make sure our priorities are straight, all is good. Hell I wouldn't even have a problem with bulk exports as long as we could turn the tap off any time we wanted, but there's the rub. The other rub is the Liberals giving water to their corporate buddies even if it's needed for people, or fish.

The head of Nestle has said that water is only a human right up to 100 liters, everything else should be corporatized. Y'all in North Van use about 550 liters per person, tho that includes all uses involving city water supply, ie businesses as well.

[Zipperfish]

andyt andyt:

WEll, water is already a commodity - used by all sorts of industries. As long as we keep that commodity at home, and make sure our priorities are straight, all is good. Hell I wouldn't even have a problem with bulk exports as long as we could turn the tap off any time we wanted, but there's the rub. The other rub is the Liberals giving water to their corporate buddies even if it's needed for people, or fish.

The head of Nestle has said that water is only a human right up to 100 liters, everything else should be corporatized. Y'all in North Van use about 550 liters per person, tho that includes all uses involving city water supply, ie businesses as well.

Water is primarily a public good right now, not a private one. I'd like to keep it that way. And I'd prefer we didn't give away our resources for a pittance, but that's Canada--hewers of wood and drawers of water. I don't really give a shit what the head of Nestle says.

[andyt]

Absolutely, our water should be socialist. But we could sell some of it like we do trees, say. As with trees, we just have to make sure to get the best price for it, and not harm the resource as we harvest it.

For water, I don't think we'll have anything to worry about on the coast. we'll continue to get plenty of it. We just need to make sure to store it adequately for the summer months, especially if we don't get much of a snow pack in the winter.

[PublicAnimalNo9]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

EHRMAGERD! Slow Internet! ha ha ha. Someone posted this somewhere's else. New protocol--check date always.

Pffft. That's the CBC for ya, posting 16 yr old news on their website. I know because I saw that very article the day after this thread was made. They do it all the damn time too but it's usually within 3 years or so at least, not 16 freakin' years.