EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Guest author: Krasen Stanchev
Here's what I had to comment on the sighs of an old friend...
The calculations of humanity's resources on the occasion of August 2 are not just incorrect, dear Petko (Simeonov), but they are also incorrectly conceived, calculated and explained.
Since the "Club of Rome" until now, resources have "run out" about nine times.
In reality: the land and air are cleaner, less energy is spent on the production of one lev of income, rivers polluted during the Club's time are clean, between 40 and 50% of waste is recycled, and where there is normal protection of property rights and the possibility of negotiating them, negative externalities are resolved and endangered animal species are more often saved.
I will give three examples from Bulgaria of developments since the time of the Club of Rome until now:
1. Pirin, for which we barely found 400 thousand leva in the 1991 budget and for which various people whine and show various photos from construction sites (2002), now has more plant and animal species than back then, in 2001, and this fact is confirmed by every measurement or count (only the small ones are fewer, because no one there has set a goal to increase their number).
2. All the enterprises that I, as chairman of the committee in the Supreme National Assembly, had to close due to pollution (because deputies of all denominations had promised so and because the governments of Atanasov, Lukanov and Popov were afraid to take any action - mainly because there would be no money to pay off state debts) - are today among the cleanest in Europe and the world. Among them are KCM (about which we heard 162 experts and organizations in two committees of the Supreme National Assembly) and Chelopech (about which we made a decision to close on August 10, 1990). And this is so because they are profitable and can update their technologies. Only two of the then losing and polluting enterprises went bankrupt (Kremikovtsi - for whose closure I have a certain role and OCC), although I am convinced that if they had not been robbed with the help of several governments (mostly that of Stanishev), they could have been cleaned up and suffered the fate of the others. It is interesting to know that the improvement of enterprises such as profit and cleanliness does not depend on the way they were privatized.
3. In 1998, the one thousandth worker of the Kozloduy NPP worked to power the tube televisions in Bulgaria, and a new Lada in 1978 consumed twice as much gasoline and emitted 12 times more dirt than my current, 1.5 times more powerful, larger, safer and more comfortable eight-year-old Toyota.
Why is this so, you might ask?
Because under the above conditions (protection of property rights and negotiation), the most important resource is man, who in the tacitly admiring accounts is presented only as a destroyer (and resources are taken as a constant independent of him, of his creativity and economy). If one looks at the "arguments" one will see that the main reason for the "exhaustion" of resources according to the self-proclaimed vulgar eschatologists (otherwise eschatology is a noble theological pursuit) is that people live better, especially those in China and India. There they already eat meat, have cars and smart phones - what an outrage, guard, what are the governments doing!
An economist explaining climate change to you is like a car mechanic explaining diabetes to you - he can certainly talk a lot, but that doesn't make him an expert. The most obvious nonsense is the explanation about cars - it's great that car manufacturers have learned to lie about fuel consumption, but it's also true that the number of cars is growing along with the munching Chinese and Indians. The deindustrialization of Europe has cleaned up the Elbe and the Rhine, but for two weeks a year these same Chinese don't dare leave their homes because of the disease-causing smog. Where industry has really cleaned up, it's done so with a lot of pushing and pulling from the nasty, dirty, bureaucratic, non-market regulation of governments and the EU, and scientific and technical progress is made with unfairly stolen taxpayers' money.
So, how have "car manufacturers learned to lie about fuel consumption", when you can always check what and how much you fill up at the gas station - how in a volume of 1l. can you put 1.3l of liquid, for example? Why do you bother to refute a smart person, when it is clearly impossible for you and you provoke condescension?! The latter directly breaks "scientific and technical progress is made with unjustly stolen taxpayers' money."