Biden announces 10-year deadline to remove all lead pipes nationwide
Biden announces 10-year deadline to remove all lead pipes nationwide
The EPA estimates that nine million homes in the U.S. have lead pipes.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20665840
President Biden on Tuesday announced $2.6 billion in funding to replace all lead pipes in the United States as part of a new EPA rule that will require lead pipes to be identified and replaced within 10 years using the new funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.
WE STILL HAVE LEAD PIPES???
Yup, it's not ideal.
For slight contextualization on why it's not the worst: for the most part, the lead pipes have a layer of scale (material from water reacting with the pipe) that keeps lead out of the water.
We stopped installing new lead pipes quite a while ago, and the program to fully phase them out was started in the 90s. This was relatively routine for developed countries, as lead pipes were extremely common across the world.After Flint, it became apparent that this wasn't the "slow fix" problem everyone thought after we saw how easily it could go to full "problem". So everyone accelerated the timeline.
So while it's definitely a problem, it's not an entirely novel or extremely critical problem.
Yep, most old houses that haven't updated their plumbing do. If it ain't broke don't fix it mentality.
LIBERAL PLOT TO GET RID OF CONSERVITIVES!!! WE CANT TOLLERATE THIS DEEP STATE LIBERAL BIG GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE IN OUR HOMES. IF LEAD WAS SO BAD WHY WOULD THEY SELL MINERAL WATER, CHECKMATE LIBTARDS. /s
WHY DOES LIBERAL COMMUNIST TIM WALZ HATE OUR PLUMBERS?!
Actually, this is good news for plumbers. Biden’s obviously being controlled by the deep plumb.
Lead culinary water pipes (or lead soldier) is a problem, but lead shower pans (that affect the sewer water) are the preference in many USA cities.
We need lead for war?
I’m a republican and I love this.
what's next? remove lead acetate from wine? smh this is tyranny
You can pry my wine sweetener from my cold, dead, neurologically damaged hands.
bUt ThE eCoNoMy?!?!?
President Biden on Tuesday announced $2.6 billion in funding to replace all lead pipes in the United States as part of a new EPA rule that will require lead pipes to be identified and replaced within 10 years using the new funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.
The EPA estimates that nine million homes in the U.S. still have lead pipes. The city of Milwaukee, where Mr. Biden is making the announcement, has 65,000 lead pipes, which the city says will cost an estimated $700 million to remove.
How is it going to cover the whole country when 1/4 of the total is needed for just one city?
The math ain't mathing....
Maybe if we took the 17+ billion dollars Biden sent to Israel so they can genocide all their neighbors it would be enough, but 2.6 billion is nowhere near enough to actually fix this problem, but is it enough for people to give Biden credit before it's done. No idea why people keep wanting to do that. The vast majority of the time nothing ever gets done.
It's not supposed to cover the entire thing. Actual estimates for the whole thing are at $20 to $30 billion. This is just the latest round of funding for the pipe replacement, not the entire thing. The Biden administration has secured $15 billion in funding for lead pipe replacement to date.
The article posted above reads: "The $2.6 billion is the latest disbursement by the Biden administration for lead pipes in the $50 billion from the 2021 infrastructure law for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure." But you decided to read one paragraph in (which could I guess be further than average) and write a long-winded outraged comment that it isn't enough.
Oh wow...
So it is almost as much as we've given this year to a foreign country with free higher education and universal healthcare so they can maintain their standard of living while genociding their neighbors...
Yeah. This is waaaaay better and there's no issue with this at all. We just have to wait a decade, this isn't something Biden can speed up by just going around congress, he only does that for important things like supporting genocide.
The program has been going on for decades. The Feds put money in a big account the EPA manages that gives grants and loans to areas that need it to get the process completed faster.
As loans get repaid over the years, the money is leant out again. Most areas have enough income to afford the project, but not enough cash on hand to afford to pay all at once.This is the first batch of additional money being added to the fund along with a mandate that the problem be resolved in a fixed timeframe.
Currently the fund has used about $20billion to provide $40billion in upgrades over nearly 30 years.
Funding: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides $50 billion to support upgrades to the nation’s drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. This includes $15 billion over five years dedicated to lead service line replacement and $11.7 billion of general Drinking Water State Revolving Funds that can also be used for lead service line replacement. There are a number of additional pathways for systems to receive financial support for lead service line replacement. These include billions available as low- to no-cost financing through annual funding provided through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) program and low-cost financing from the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) program. Funding may also be available from other federal agencies, state, and local governments. These efforts also advance the Biden-Harris Administration’s Justice40 Initiative, which sets the goal that 40% of the overall benefits of certain Federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.
Cities should take on most of the cost themselves. Some cities have already done this from their own revenue - pipes wear out over time and so on - why should those cities pay for cities that couldn't be bothered?
- The citizens in those cities don't deserve to have lead poisoning regardless of what city and state officials are willing to allocate to it.
- Some cities just objectively have worse lead problems than others.
- This feels like the "well I paid off my student loans through hard work, so why should they get theirs paid off for free?" argument. (They are still paying through their own funds too; they're just receiving federal help to accelerate it.)
- Having citizens that aren't poisoned by lead is good for the whole of the country, full stop.
I didn't downvote you, by the way; I at least understand the rationale on a surface level.