"CALIFORNIA, WATER YOU DOING?"

"Apparently we are supposed to be worried about fracking depleting water in California. ThinkProgress reports that Despite Historic Drought, California Used 70 Million Gallons Of Water For Fracking Last Year. Similar concerns are raised by RT, Huffington Post, and even The New York Times. But 70 million gallons equals 214 acre-feet. Remember, alfalfa production uses 5.3 million acre feet. In our family-of-four analogy above, all the fracking in California costs them about a quarter. Worrying over fracking is like seeing an upper middle class family who are $6,000 in debt, and freaking out because one of their kids bought a gumball from a machine.

Apparently we are also supposed to be worried about Nestle bottling water in California. ABC News writes an article called Nestle Needs To Stop Bottling Water In Drought-Stricken California, Advocacy Group Says, about a group called the “Courage Campaign” who have gotten 135,000 signatures on a petition saying that Nestle needs to stop “bottling the scarce resource straight from the heart of California’s drought and selling it for profit.” Salon goes even further – their article is called Nestle’s Despicable Water Crisis Profiteering: How It’s Making A Killing While California Is Dying Of Thirst, and as always with this sort of thing Jezebel also has to get in on the action. But Nestle’s plant uses only 150 acre-feet, about one forty-thousandth the amount used to grow alfalfa, and the equivalent of about a dime to our family of four...

Finally, Marginal Revolution and even some among the mysterious and endangered population of non-blog-having economists are talking about how really the system of price controls and subsidies in the water market is ridiculous and if we had a free market on water all of our problems would be solved. It looks to me like that’s probably right."
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/

This is actually SUPER useful for seeing how all these kinds of claims can happen and what those metrics really mean.
(credit to BK)