If Water Was Outlawed, Only Outlaws Would Have Water

EPA Battles Over Dangerous New Pollutant – Water

Following its designation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant, the Environmental Protection Agency will go one step further, appearing in federal court on Friday to seek the designation of a new ecological scourge: Water.

The EPA, hoping to improve health of Virginia’s environment, has ordered a 50 percent reduction in the amount of water flowing daily through Fairfax County’s Accotink Creek in Northern Virginia. That could cost the county and state up to half a billion dollars in land acquisition and storm-water runoff costs.

...The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has joined forces with Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in a lawsuit seeking to block the mandate. State and local officials charge that the EPA move far exceeds its legal authority.

“EPA literally is treating water itself—the very substance the Clean Water Act was created to protect -- as a pollutant,” states the complaint Virginia officials have filed.

It makes sense, H2O and CO2 have similar toxicity; if you surround yourself with either one, and try to breathe, you will die.

Seriously; it's not clear what this is all about. What flows out of a given stream is almost entirely due to the amount of rainfall that fall on it's watershed, and how much of that can sink into the groundwater.

I wrote about this earlier.  I can see where, if the water were contaminated with some pollutant, they could order the pollutant controlled, which might de facto require control of the water, but to merely order control over the amount of flow entering a creek?

Fairfax County Supervisor John Cook, a Republican, told the Washington Post: “When people talk about federal agencies running amok, this is exactly what it looks like. The EPA’s overreach is so extreme that the Democrats on the board realized that, even in an election year, they had to do this for the county.”