Clean drinking water is a modern miracle. But it has become expensive, and it doesn’t need to be.
San Francisco has some of the strictest environmental rules on the planet. The city has legally committed itself to sending zero garbage to landfills by 2030 and to using 100 percent clean energy by 2040. It was among the first to ban plastic bags and new gas boilers. It has twice been named the number one city in America for clean energy.
Yet in 2019 the federal Environmental Protection Agency ordered the city to take action to limit its alleged contamination of the Pacific Ocean. In oral arguments before the US Supreme Court, the EPA’s lawyer condemned the city’s ‘decades-long failure’ to update its sanitation systems. This order came on top of an existing mandate requiring San Francisco to spend almost $11 billion, or $13,000 for every man, woman, and child in the city, updating its sewage systems.
Continue reading the entire piece at Works in Progress
______________________
Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
Photo by Akaradech Pramoonsin/Getty Images