Got an environmental catastrophe? Blame the government.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Column

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.

First on the Foreign Policy's list: five decades of Nigerian oil spills. On the economic freedom index, Nigeria ranks 106th out of 183 countries; it is described as "mostly unfree" On the rule of law index, the country garners a pitiful score of II out of a possible 100.

The Nigerian government owns all of the country's petroleum resources and works in partnership with Western oil companies to exploit them. Since 1966 some 546 million gallons of that oil have been spilled--the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez disaster every year.

Oil accounts for 90 percent of Nigeria's exports and 80 percent of the government's revenues. Naturally, the government is more interested in maximizing revenues than it is in reducing pollution. In fact, the government has been so assiduously draining the Nigerian National Petroleum Company of revenues that the company reportedly is now insolvent. Foreign Policy notes that the number and severity of spills may increase as oil exploration extends into more remote and difficult terrain.

The second disaster on the list is a massive collection of coal-seam fires in China. China ranks 140th on the economic freedom index--another "mostly unfree" rating--and scores 45 out of 100 on the rule of law index.

Foreign Policy cites 62 underground coal fires that have been burning since the '60s. That was when the coal industry was entirely run by the country's communist government; as part of its drive to develop its "socialist market economy," the Chinese government now leases some mineral rights to private companies. The underground fires burn up more than 20...