TAKING STOCK : The crackpot environmentalists Companies want to maximise profits. One way they can do so is by cutting costs. The other is by consuming less of raw materials. Coke did exactly this. Its aluminum cans are now thinner and comprise of less than half the metal used prior to the 1970’s. Coke, and other users of metals do not spend vast amounts on research and development (R&D) because they want to protect the environment by conserving resources. They do it because lower consumption of raw materials means a better bottomline. In May 1954, Roger Bannister of England became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes. After he showed that it could be done, thousands have achieved the feat. Similarly, once a company develops a new cost saving technology, it doesn’t take time for it to be duplicated, spread around the world, and benefit every company. Competition then ensures that the savings in cost are passed on to the consumer in the form of lower prices. As soon as Pepsi adopts Coke’s innovations, Coke has to do even better to gain an edge. R&D then is a constant process. That is how the cans became progressively thinner using ever decreasing amounts of aluminum. Let us take the telecommunication industry. Innovations have been coming fast and furious. We have seen how quickly Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Ericsson bring out new, sleeker models of their cell phones in order to be one up on the other. Not only are the looks better but what you can do with the phones keeps growing as well. Improvements in call delivery technology have again shown a huge bias towards resource conservation. The world has gone from using expensive copper wires to using abundant and therefore almost free sand, which is what is used in manufacture of semiconductor chips. These power not only cell phones, and computers, but other modem day electronic appliances as well. Satellite signals have eliminated even the use of sand for communications, lowering resource requirements even further. Even as the use of physical resources decreases, that of the human mind mcreases. The airplanes flying today weigh less and consume much less fuel than the clunky guzzlers of yesteryears. I have flown to Kyrgyzstan in planes using outdated, communist USSR era technology. These weigh twice as much as modem Boeings and consume thrice as much fuel. No private airline facing competition would dare fly such fuel squanderers. It would be an invitation to bankruptcy. Evidence of these in-built incentives to conserve in a free open market capitalist system are ignored by lunatics posing as environmentalists. They try to block, obstruct, and delay spread of capitalism which is what will end the world’s poverty even as it protects the environment. Further these nuts overlook the fact that private property provides the best motivation for protecting the environment. When people own homes they take better care of them. Similarly when companies individuals own forests, rivers, lakes, parks, whatever, they take better care of it. Government ownership of property means no one has any incentive to preserve it. Environmental cranks ignore the evidence of degradation caused by government ownership and control. And instead opposing it they want more of the same. Soviet Russia shows what happens when state ownership is taken to the extreme. After communism’s fall in the 1980’s the world saw its effects: forests had turned into deserts; rivers were so polluted with oil that they caught fire; lakes like the ‘Baikal’ were so full of untreated sewage that no one would think of swimming in it; fertile soils had been so ravaged by chemical fertilizers that nothing grew there, not even weeds; air quality was worse than in any other country; nuclear contamination as a result of the Chemobyl disaster was so devastating that thousands of kilometers had turned into wasteland and hundreds of thousands faced vast increases in the risk of contracting cancer and worse. Socialism and Communism destroy the environment. If we want to protect it, capitalism is our best bet. Progress and wealth will better the quality of air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink. Listening to anti-development ‘cuckoos’ is a sure invitation to hunger, poverty and environmental degradation. (The writer can be contacted at: everest@mos.com.np)