January 12, 2009 1:30PM # Government the Environmental Despoiler By [Chris Edwards](https://www.cato.org/people/chris-edwards) --- SHARE The [*Washington Post* editorialized today ](http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/NewsSearch?sb=-1&st="2000)on an egregious environmental foul-up by the Tennessee Valley Authority: “As bad as this disaster was, what made it worse was the revelation that such pools of pollutants aren’t federally regulated.” Efforts to regulate the problem have been “beaten back by industry” in the past, the *Post* says. But, wait — the TVA is owned by the federal government. It’s a government entity, not part of private “industry.” So much for the notion that government organizations are good environmental stewards because they don’t have to grub for profits. Certainly, the environmental problem described by the *Post* is a serious one. But let’s not frame this as Green Government vs. Dirty Private Industry. Indeed, the federal Department of Energy, for example, has had an atrocious environmental record over the decades. ##### Related Tags [Energy and Environment](https://www.cato.org/research/energy-environment) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).