I don't know the particulars in this case but is Nestlé going to pay proper amount for this water? If the public doesn't want the plant then shouldn't their desires carry some weight? Especially since it doesn't appear that Nestlé would be providing a service in the interests of society at large.

Overall there is a growing sense in the U.S. that public assets are being sold off at below market rates. That corporate interests trump public interests. There's a lack of trust in the system. The overreaction, as you put it, here seems to me to be a symptom of what I think is a growing lack of trust in the system.

Nestle is paying $5200 for all the water it is drawing. I'd be willing to wager they're paying 10-20x that on lobbying efforts.

https://www.bridgemi.com/guest-commentary/opinion-nestle-wat...

The county they're in has high unemployment and they make the case that it's all about the jobs they're creating.

That is the permit application fee (one time, $5,000) and reporting costs ($200 / year). They aren't paying for the water.

Detroit is currently selling water for $23/thousand cubic feet, or about .000321/gallon. That's filtered, treated, and distributed to a tap in every home.

What do you imagine a fair price would be for untreated, pump-it-yourself groundwater?

http://www.detroitmi.gov/Portals/0/docs/DWSD/Water%20Rate%20...

When you pay for residential water, you're not actually paying for the water. You're paying infrastructure costs, the cost of running the pumping station and repairing the pipes to your house.

> I don't know the particulars in this case but is Nestlé going to pay proper amount for this water?

This is just a permit to draw water from a well, not a municipal drinking water supply. I suspect that (other than the permit fee) they aren't paying anything for the water. (I had a look at the permit & didn't see anything there about payments).

> I don't know the particulars in this case but is Nestlé going to pay proper amount for this water?

I suspect the value of untreated groundwater in Michigan is very, very small.

> there doesn't appear that Nestlé would be providing a service in the interests of society at large.

What about jobs? What about the people who want to buy bottled water? Why don't the workers and consumers count as "society at large"?

Note: I personally think most people who buy bottled water are foolish (unless the local tap water is unsafe or unpalatable), but then people do a lot of things I think are foolish.

This is a false equivalence - discharge rate of the Muskegon is not the same as refill rate of the aquifer being drained.

The aquifer we're talking about holds about as much water as Lake Michigan. It is huge on a scale that dwarfs human enterprise.

Bernie Madoff's $68.5 billion ponzi scheme was a MERE 0.09% of the world's $78.3 trillion GDP.

Are they pumping the water from the Muskegon River? No? OK... then... uh... what are you talking about?

Nope, they are pumping from the "White Pine Springs well". The aquifer likely refills at a much slower rate than the flow of the Muskegon River

> The watershed and the associated aquifer are where the river water comes from

Yes, that's where it comes from, but it doesn't fill up instantly. Depending on the depth and type of aquifer the well is tapping, it could actually take a very long time for the aquifer to refill (or it could refill very quickly).

Do such "fossil aquifers" exist? Yes.

Are they widely used in places like Michigan, where there is plenty of precipitation? No.

Rather than making blanket statements, here is the actual aquifer characteristics. https://www.michigan.gov/documents/deq/wrd-nestle-attach-5-a... which is of course much more nuanced, and interesting than "it rains a lot".

Okay,fine. Where in that report does it say that the amount of water Nestle is proposing to pump will make a significant impact on the aquifer?

Hint: nowhere.

Isn't that apples and oranges, comparing the numbers like that? The river is connected to the water table, sure, but surely the issue is more complicated than that?

I don't see how it could be more complicated. Any groundwater that isn't pumped out and used is going to eventually go down the river, right? Otherwise the area would be underwater.

Yeah, there are places where groundwater enters the aquifer from long distances away. Michigan is not one of those places. It gets plenty of precipitation.

“Eventually” is quite the weasel word in this context. Yes, eventually it will, for values of eventually which may exceed the average human lifespan.

The facility is only one of many uses for water in the area. Suggesting the rivers flow is 100% free to use is extremely misguided.

1/2000 is a meaningless number because you don't know if hypothetically 2000/2000 of the flow is already assigned to other uses then there is zero left over and someone is losing out.

Hydro power for example uses 100% of the flow so removing that water directly reduces power output of downstream power plants.

Water rights aren't terribly contentious in that part of Michigan. The Muskegon is tiny and the sort of river hydro is being removed from.

http://glpf.org/funded-projects/muskegon-river-dam-removal/

The Muskegon feeds into the Lake Michigan which is thus upstream of Niagara Falls and a lot of hydro power generation. Granted we are not talking about a huge amount of energy, but it is one of many costs that are not being compensated.

Compare the amount of water they're taking out per day (576,000 gallons) to amount of water that goes over Niagara Falls in a day (about 54,345,600,000 gallons).

"Not a huge amount of energy", indeed.

In the short term perhaps, but it's not going to take that long to hit 10,000$ worth of energy and again that's just one of many uses of this water which as far as I can tell is uncompensated.