Deputy Minister of Environment and Water Affairs Chavdar Georgiev, information and public relations of State Forestry Agency Spas Todorov and businessman Hristo Kovachki faced the co-chairperson of the newly-registered political party Zelenite (Bulgarian Greens) Andrey Kovachev, Alexander Dounchev from the Association of Bulgarian Parks and a large group of environmentalists during a face-to-face debate All for Green on June 24 in the Red House for Culture and Debate in Sofia.

According to Kovachki, who has extensive business interests in the energy sector and has also put forward a project for a new ski resort in Rila Mountains, the future of the planet lay in nuclear energy and in coal-generated electricity. He said that Bulgaria needed to use its remaining fossil fuels because this way it would remain independent and because the price of all other fuels was increasing. Bulgaria had enough coal for another 150 years, he said. Asked when he would start installing the necessary environmental protection equipment at the thermal power plants he owned, Kovachki said that he will respect the European Union requirements and will install the equipment by ,2015 but not earlier.

According to Kovachki, the EU was choosing a wrong direction by accepting that the world would produce energy from renewable energy sources. “If we think that we will become a competitive country by developing such kind of energy, this is fiction,” he said. According to him, nuclear energy was not polluting the environment.

Commenting on nuclear energy, Kovachev said that it was not leading to independency, as by constructing Belene nuclear power plant, the country was binding itself to Russia. He said that this kind of energy is not environmentally-friendly because of the processed nuclear fuel, the storage of which was not safe. According to him, it is also not the best for the population, as the electricity produced by nuclear means was the most expensive one.

Georgiev spoke in favour of developing nuclear energy in Bulgaria, as well as for the construction of oil and gas pipelines through the country’s territory. According to the environmentalists, nuclear energy is not environmentally friendly, while the oil and gas pipelines not only threatened the environment, but were also an investment in resources that would be exhausted in the near future.

Asked which are the most important environmental problems of Bulgaria, Georgiev said that he would not classify them, as according to him all of them were important. Kovachev said that the main topics concerning environmental protection in Bulgaria were the energy production, the protection of wild nature, biodiversity and forests, pollution and human health. He said that for the 15 years that he has worked in the environmental filed, there has been no green policy in Bulgaria.

Georgiev re-iterated the position that the Ministry of Environment and Water Affairs (MOEW) was doing the best it could and that its policy was to develop Bulgaria in a modern way. He said MOEW was following all legal procedures and respecting the law. According to Georgiev, the current Government was the best one, as it paved Bulgaria’s road to the EU.

The debate went on for three hours. Other topics discussed were the construction of winter resorts in Bulgaria and the land exchanges of forests in areas that attract investor interest due to opportunities for tourism.

Kovachev said that it was not a sustainable decision to invest in winter resorts located under 1000m above the sea level and no other country in Europe besides Bulgaria did so. Georgiev and Kovachki defended the position that Bulgaria needed to attract more foreign tourists and this was the way to do it.

Kovachev said that a country develops real tourism by initially creating conditions for its own population and after thatthinking about foreign tourists. This was not a sustainable way, as the country already had the bad example of the winter resort Bansko, which suffered from over-construction. Resorts like Bansko and Borovets only attracted Russian and British tourists, who were banned from resorts in other counties because they drank too much alcohol, Kovachev said.

Kovachki answered that by creating good conditions in his new resort in Rila Mountain near the village of Govedartsi, the country would attract better tourists. “You learn through your mistakes,” he said.