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Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover
daem0n1x writes "It appears that some countries in oil-poor Europe are making a successful transition to renewable energy at a fast and steady pace. This article talks about the small country of Portugal on the West Coast of Europe, known for its white sand beaches, oranges, fish, and wines. Portugal has no oil, but lots of sun and wind. Five years ago, the government decided, against many dissenting voices, to invest massively in taking advantage of the country's natural resources in clean energy. The results are here. It used to be a heavy energy importer, but now it exports it."
You can always find the truth buried near the end of the article:
But a decade ago in Portugal, as in many places in the United States today, power companies owned not only power generating plants, but also transmission lines. Those companies have little incentive to welcome new sources of renewable energy, which compete with their investment in fossil fuels. So in 2000, Portugal’s first step was to separate making electricity from transporting it, through a mandatory purchase by the government of all transmission lines for electricity and gas at what were deemed fair market prices.
Fox News translation: Obama bin Laden wants steal our energy and kill your grandmother! Let freedom ring for... um... dirty coal power.
It's hard. It's expensive. It won't please everyone. But it is totally worth it for future generations. It takes vision, vision beyond the end of our noses, to realize that.
That is the issue though. The summary mentions how Portugal is poor in oil but has a great deal of potential for solar and wind. This implies that by using sun and wind to create electricity somehow oil usage will drop. While I heavily support the switch to alternative fuels, this is just not true. Most oil is used for transportation rather than electricity. So the only way to save oil by switching to solar or wind is to use electric cars, which in general are not popular enough to be a heavy drain on the power grid. People really do need to learn the difference between electricity generation and oil usage, if nothing else just to make an informed decision when creating policy.
Your link also indicates that Portugal's public debt is 75.2% of the GDP (getting this number from the CIA fact book and the other one from The Economist).
The United States' public debt is 88% of the GDP without the huge investment in renewable sources of energy. What's their excuse?
I'm not saying Portugal's economy is better than that of the United States — it isn't. I'm just pointing out that public debt as a percentage of the GDP is not the best way to assess the health of an economy or if an investment in cleaner energy is a good idea.
This implies that by using sun and wind to create electricity somehow oil usage will drop. While I heavily support the switch to alternative fuels, this is just not true. Most oil is used for transportation rather than electricity. So the only way to save oil by switching to solar or wind is to use electric car.
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
Ok, so quitting the car habit is a hard task in the sprawltastic U.S., but much of Europe is quite suited to better transportation mechanisms.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Dumping pollution into the environment is often cheaper, at least in the short term, than trying to avoid creating waste, or trying to dump the waste responsibly. Burning coal is cheaper because of this. If you factor in the costs -- acid rain, altering the chemistry of the air, acidification of the oceans -- coal is more expensive.
And, by reducing their fossil fuel imports Portugal has now insulated themselves from the vagaries of the energy market. The next time oil prices spike the US will be force to send crates of money to unfriendly regimes because the US is addicted to their oil. Portugal will thrive while the US stumbles.
Portugal is planning ahead. The US is hoping that it can continue to be profligate forever.
Money isn't necessarily a proxy for emissions. Often it is a proxy for human labor.
But my point is to question if this is a positive or a negative point. Sure it's nice to have clean energy, but there are downsides too. It involved investing billions that could have been used for other purposes, not least tax breaks for individuals and businesses.
Just look at Ireland (well it's in crisis too but there is no question that lowering taxes was a huge factor in the unprecedented economic boom there). What if they decided that instead of bringing in hundreds of high tech companies by very low business taxes they decided to invest that money in windmills, solar plants and the best broadband in the world? Maybe they would be in Portugal's place today (btw Ireland GDP per capita today: $39K, Portugal: $21K - 20 years ago they were about the same).
Another problem is higher electricity prices. There is no surer way to reduce jobs, increase prices and generally harm the economy than by increasing energy cost.
Disclaimer: I don't know if what I said above has anything to do with reality in Portugal, I am just pointing out that there are two sides to clean energy equation
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Pumping out enough renewable energy over a state of the art grid means being able to fuel electric cars en masse.
More electric cars -> less oil.
Besides, there is a direct correlation between the current price for oil(which is based off of demand) and the price of other energy resources.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
First of all, cutting taxes is generally understood to be good for the economy.
Citation needed.
Fighting wars generally isn't, so I don't know why you are bundling those two together.
If you had a drug addiction, and you were always broke, there's a very good reason to think that ending the drug addiction would solve the second problem.
Secondly, the two wars were generally supported by both parties (though in case of Iraq there were more opponents among Democrats but that was mostly posturing for political reasons). I don't think it's clear at all that the US foreign policy would have been any different under Clinton or, god forbid, Gore especially after 9/11.
Let's see: we've spent a few trillion dollars, increased recruitment to Al Qaeda, funneled money to the Taliban through the ISI, lost thousands of soldier's lives, maimed thousands more, killed a few hundred thousand muslims, displaced a few million more, given up habeas corpus, built secret prisons around the world for the purposes of rendition and torture, and we've handed the war in Afghanistan - the "good" one - over to the CIA and Task Force 373 that's busy extrajudicially executing terrorism suspects.
What could Gore, or anyone, have possibly fucked up more than that?
I don't think the recession was caused by Obama nor inherited from Bush. It's simplistic to the point of ridiculous to view something as complex as the economic cycle as determined by which president is in office even though their decisions of course have some impact.
Generally speaking, Democratic administrations have reduced military spending and increased taxes. Have a look at the results for yourself: http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
Democrats aren't inherently better or anything, but at least they have demonstrated that cutting military spending and progressive taxes reduce the national debt. If people making more than 160,000 a year are really going to quit working over a 4% increase in Federal tax income, I say good riddance. There are plenty of people who will step up to take their place. They deserve to lose money for being fair weather patriots, who apparently only care about this country when it's dumping cash into their pockets.
Thanks for pointing out that Portugal is "a small country .... on the West Coast of Europe, known for its white sand beaches, oranges, fish, and wines".
For us non-USA folk, could you Americans give us geographical guidance when referring to US states, e.g. rather than just saying "New England", could you provide similar context, for example, say "New England is a small state on the East Coast of the USA, known for its historical districts, American Football team and ..." (umm well I don't know anything else so this is why I could do with some help).
This kind of context would be really helpful for us non-Americans! ;-)
I think Americans knowledge of European countries is about the same as Europeans knowledge of US states. Probably in both cases knowledge is biased to places which feature more in movies.
Cutting taxes is often NOT good for the economy, especially long term when there is a lot of debt and unfunded entitlement programs, and programs that are desperately needed but have yet to be created and funded. I don't think Gore would have done much different to stop the coming recession, he's not socialist enough to have really challenged the corrupt capitalist system that causes the depression cycle, but we would have been in an incredibly more favorable position to ride it out than we were and are in. He also would not have attacked Iraq - a war of choice which has done nothing to improve our security and has in fact weakened it and squandered our hard earned reputation with the rest of the world.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Your argument doesn't make any sense and reeks of lame excuse. Here in Portugal we have towns with a nearby wind farm that are self-sufficient in electricity. How difficult is this in the US? Don't you have towns with lots of windy and sunny desert/mountains/plains around?
Also, for example, the NY state is huge and mostly rural. How hard is it to put wind farms on it to feed the power-hungry city of New York?
Or you take advantage on the sun and wind in Arizona, a huge state with very little population and feed the big Californian cities with renewable electricity. Is it so hard to transport electricity a few hundreds of Km? We do it here. Why can't you?
It won't solve the energy problems, but it will certainly help. If you let the "market" decide, the polluting energies win, because they're cheaper in the short term (they appear cheap because nobody gives a fuck about environmental costs). But investing in the future means taking chances and, when eventually oil and gas get extremely expensive (believe me, they will), suddenly finding you're decades behind in diversifying your energy production sources won't help your economy much.
Your reasons do not explain the Gini index. This is clearly caused by poor wealth distribution, which goes against your arguments.
The heavy taxation and the weight of State in the economy that you complain about are a lot bigger in Scandinavian countries that have the lowest Gini indexes in the world.
Your arguments are typical of the right-wing free-market mentality (called neoliberal in Europe), that has guided the policies in most of the world in the latest decades, leading our economy into ruin.