Everybody Wants to Save the Bay...

...But Nobody Wants to Pay For It:

It is appalling, though not surprising, that the Environmental Protection Agency provided no cost estimate for its plan to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. Improving the health of the Bay is desirable, and we have long urged Virginia and the other states in the watershed to take additional steps toward reducing pollution. But every government policy has diminishing marginal returns, and the lack of even a rough estimate for the EPA's program makes a fair accounting of its costs and benefits markedly more difficult.

The cost to Virginia could run the neighborhood of $7 billion over the 15-year life of the plan. A 2006 study found Pennsylvania would need to shell out $2 billion for some of the changes the EPA wants to make there. West Virginia anticipates a bill of more than $130 million just to upgrade its sewage-treatment plants...

As Everett Dirksen  once said "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money."

Little wonder, then, that discussion of which states should pay for cleaning up the Bay sounds like the debate over which countries should most reduce their carbon emissions to combat global warming. "We don't feel that we're contributing a tremendous amount [of pollution] to the Bay," says a West Virginia official. A Pennsylvania official says his state is meeting targets for nitrogen and sediment runoff reduction and has already added new stormwater regulations. The president of the Maryland State Builders Association contends that "Maryland has the tougher set of regulations and has had them in place longer than most other Bay states. . . . We don't want to have further imposition of requirements just because the other states are lagging."

 This thread needs a picture, so we know what we're spending the money on: