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Are Privatized Water Utilities in Cahoots With Shale Gas Companies?
On one hand, we have shale gas companies who have been rushing into various regions of the country to extract gas using a dangerous extraction process that involves toxic chemicals potentially contaminating our drinking water. On the other hand, we also have investor-owned water utilities (IOU’s) who are taking a public resource out of the hands of the public and profiting greatly from it. What happens when you put them both together? The results are revealed in the latest Food & Water Watch Report, Why the Water Industry is Promoting Shale Gas Development and they could involve the over-generalization of water quality tests, increased water rates and big profits… for the investors. 
The report details big concerns about the sketchy relationship between IOU’s and gas companies, including the possibility that IOU’s would protect their investment even if it meant downplaying the risks of contamination caused by their new customers: shale gas companies.
Not only that, but water contamination in a community can lead to new customers for the private water utilities when they need to find a new source of drinking water. Look at what’s happening in Pavillion, Wyoming and Dimock, Pennsylvania, and you can see that this could be a tricky relationship to monitor. If your household relies on its own drinking water well and it suddenly becomes contaminated, you might have to deal with switching to an IOU to provide your water. They can benefit from contamination.
The report also points to IOU’s giving gas-drilling companies discounted rates for water—an average of 45 percent less than residential customers, in the case of one IOU. This sets the tone for water—a public resource —to be sold cheaply to shale gas companies, giving IOU’s a handsome profit. And this water would be used for fracking, which could potentially contaminate water sources.
Do we really want to sell our clean water up the river?
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8 Comments so far
Show AllHoly crap. Newly privitized water companies turning out to be the fracking gas shitheads and Justice Thomas's wife becoming a lobbyist for the newest crime family. It just gets stranger and stranger. The US population, other than the Occupiers, won't react until all their grandchildren are being born with no arms.
Didn't Rachel Carson and Henrick Ibsen already deal with this shit. What do people read in college these days.
Ecology isn't taught on college campuses anymore.
Nestle takes water from the Great Lakes and then sells it back to people in bottles. Contaminated with BPA. I wonder what else is in the bottles?
Water will be as expensive as gas one day. Especially if it is contaminated.
Sad this World had great potential. Greed take it all.
Especially when it's owned by the same people as the big energy companies. The Bush family is highly invested in both.
Some water in bottles is more expensive than gas. I intuited this situation on CD months ago. Who profits from fracking poisoning water? People who own water resources, scarcity increases price. Its obvious, its the USA corporate modus operendi. Occupy Nature.
The front of CVS is loaded with candy and salty, fatty snacks. In the back they sell blood pressure, weight loss and anti-cholesterol medicine. Win Win.
win-win...
yes...
once you take a peoples' land, removing the ability of said people to sustain themselves, you can do whatever you want to them...
especially if they're non-violent people...
Rich Bindell ends with “Do we really want to sell our clean water up the river?” Hell yes, I say. It sure beats giving our water away and then ending up that well known creek without a paddle. We have a tradition of not collecting the economic rent on water but instead underpricing it with our water subsidies to farms in the West and subsidies to water and sewer utilities, especially since the Clean Water Act of 1972.
So investor-owned water utilities (IOU’s) give gas-drilling companies discounted rates for water. Presumably economies of scale encourage this. But government policy is also encouraging this by not recovering the rental value of our water commons in the form of dues or taxes. These taxes could very well increase with high volume users to reflect the overdrafting of aquifer or that well known creek.
Extractive industries such as gas companies are also subsidized with not even a whisper to be heard of severance and pollution taxes. So what do you have when you put together a shale gas company and an investor-owned utility? The result is one super-subsidized rent seeking conglomeration