top 5 current ecological catastrophes (incl. the BP oil spill) all strongly connected to government policy
From Ronald Bailey in Reason...
While the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was dominating summer headlines, a July 16 article in Foreign Policy listed five ongoing ecological catastrophes around the world that hadn't attracted as much attention. The article didn't mention it, but all five had something in common with one another and with BP's oil leak as well: Each was rooted in public policies that encouraged environmentally risky behavior.
That shouldn't come as a surprise. The first question you should ask when you see environmental misbehavior is: What is the government doing that encourages people to act that way?
The annual Economic Freedom Index put together by The Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation is a good shorthand indicator of bad government policies; so is the World Bank's Rule of Law Index. With those two measurements in hand, let's briefly consider each of the catastrophes.
...the Foreign Policy's list:
1.) five decades of Nigerian oil spills...
2.) a massive collection of coal-seam fires in China...
3.) deforestation in Haiti...
4.) the shrinking Aral Sea in central Asia...
5. ) the Great Pacific Garbage Patch....a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. If there is no clear ownership of a natural resource...no one is responsible for protecting it.
And the BP oil spill? It involved a resource owned by the U.S. government, which set the rules for how it would be managed and then enforced them with notorious ineptitude. BP's risky behavior also may have been encouraged by a paltry, congressionally mandated $75 million cap on liability for environmental and economic damages resulting from offshore drilling spills. And the Energy Policy Act of 2005 strongly encourages deep water oil exploration by offering a graduated suspension of royalties paid to the federal government. The deeper the water, the greater the number of barrels exempt from royalties....
UPDATE: To be clear, private actions bear ultimate responsibility in each of these examples; if people weren't knuckleheads, then we wouldn't have any of this. But the absence of govt (tragedy of the commons) and the various incompetencies of govt are also significant factors.
posted by Eric Schansberg @ 11:57 AM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
And why would oil production in the Gulf be so poorly regulated, and why would the cap on liability for oil spills be only $75 million? Because the energy companies are so rich and powerful that they usually get their way in Congress. So Bailey blames government for being weak, when it is the corporations who are to blame.
It's a dance-- and it takes at least two to tango. You've got to blame politicians, regulators, and special interest groups-- rather than letting any of them off the hook!
So, the problem is lack of government regulations. I agree
Not necessarily more, but certainly more if it's effective-- vs. inefficient by nature (e.g., the way VET was implemented in Louisville) or captured by interest groups, etc.
This is an area where markets struggle to be socially efficient. So, at least on paper, govt reg can be, gasp, efficiency-enhancing.
Of course, statists have a reflex for more regulation and redistribution-- in most any context. But even for economists and non-statists, regulation in narrow economic contexts can be effective.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home