"$1.8 billion dollars over 30 years" in a county of 3mm [1] is about $20 per person per year. Scaled nationally, that implies a cost of about $6bn a year, which sounds amply doable.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-counties/california/ora...
> PFAS can be bought for $50 - $1,000 per pound (according to MPCA estimates), but costs between $2.7 million and $18 million per pound to remove and destroy from municipal wastewater, depending on facility size.
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/news-and-stories/groundbreaking-...
> A new report by Milliman estimates that PFAS remediation costs for U.S. water districts could reach as high as $175 billion, helping companies and insurers quantify the potential exposure.
Report: https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/pfas-liability-estimate-...
https://riskandinsurance.com/costs-to-remediate-pfas-water-c...
It's kind of funny that you are like an enthusonaut when it comes to businesses and other private entities doing things and then can't imagine that pretty much the only thing government needs to do whatever is the political will.
The Inflation Reduction Act demonstrates your point about political will, but it still requires will, and once done, the policy and fiat takes time to have outcomes come out of the machine.
Nuance!
The damage and solution are both local. That reduces the minimum scale of action, which makes organising easier. It also makes benefits personal: you aren't paying $1.60 a month so someone across the world breathes easier or isn't flooded, you're paying so your family doesn't drink PFAS. And you get that benefit if your town or county agree they don't want to be poisoned; you don't need to worry about what Arizona or West Virginia are doing.
> EPA Administrator Michael Regan last month made one of his agency's strongest statements to date about the danger of "forever chemicals." New restrictions on those pollutants in drinking water would "prevent thousands of deaths and prevent tens of thousands of serious PFAS-related illnesses," Regan said.
https://www.epa.gov/pfas/key-epa-actions-address-pfas
https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/tap-water-st...
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-...
Please note that I wrote my comment before you edited in text.
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/us-population....
So why are you balking at committing resources towards doing what is needed?
Back and forth and back again.
Where are you getting this?
My cynical thought here is that, without any useful profit or revenue from such investment, that it doesn’t matter if it’s $288 million or $288 trillion: it won’t happen because capitalism simply doesn’t care if workers have bad water, so long as it doesn’t kill them quickly, same as the lead pipes problem has demonstrated.
But yeah maybe municipalities can pull it together piece by piece. Not that that'd help all the other countless sources of PFAS and similar, though.