The Biden/Regan Environmental Protection Agency has decided to get into individual municipalities’ business.

For the first time in 26 years, the US Environmental Protection Agency has issued new guidelines for drinking water safety. Municipal utilities will be required to install expensive filtration systems to lower the amount of PFAS in water supplies.

The cost of such “guidelines” will run to billions of dollars just for Illinois’ cities, towns, and villages. Multiply that by all the cities, towns, and villages across the US and our territories—the reach of the EPA—and we get a ton of costs.

PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance) and the related PFOS (perfluorooctanesulfonic acid) are chemicals that don’t appear to break down in anything approaching a useful time frame, and they are associated with a variety of cancers. That makes it useful to avoid ingesting them or inflicting them on our environment.

However.

While removal of these chemicals is a good idea, doing that alone and at the end of the production-use-disposal chain will cost the relevant jurisdictions vast sums in perpetuity. Too, after the chemicals are removed from our water supplies—what then? What will we do with those now concentrated perpetual chemicals? Nuclear waste at least breaks down after some, often extended, period of time.

Focusing on developing other materials that don’t require these chemicals, at the beginning of the production-use-disposal chain would be initially expensive and long-term far cheaper. But that wouldn’t maintain EPA power.