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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."
"The United States, which last year generated less than 5 percent of its power from newer forms of renewable energy, will lag behind..." Drill baby, drill.
"This article talks about the small country of Portugal on the West Coast of Europe" (As opposed to the other Portugal)
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.
Paying off for who? According TFA, the Portuguese government sold off the rights to the electricitiy to private companies. The government is also paying a massive subsidy to the private companies for 15 years. So the people of Portugal get to pay higher (15%) electric costs while the companies get to export energy to other nations. I'm sure you're right that there is nothing to gripe about.
And Portugal expects in 2011 to become the first country to inaugurate a national network of charging stations for electric cars.
A difficult step, yes, but without creating the market private companies won't jump in and invest.
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....
The article says Portugal is going to roll out a national network of electric vehicle charging stations in 2011. They needed the power infrastructure first.
Graham
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.
Actually most of the public transportation in the big urban areas (mind you big urban areas in here is about 5 only) run exclusively in natural gas or, in some few cases hydrogen.
One of the most important facts for that was actually not energetic consumption, but air pollution. We have many old monuments, and it's not nice to be burning oil around them.
Well, USA has a public debt of 93% and an electric grid quite archaic compared to Portugal.
And did I mention that Portugal has one of the most state of the art internet broadband internet coverage (with optical fibre connecting the house in major cities) and 3.5G across most of the country in the all world. Being Portugal only rival as far as I know, Estonia?
Yeah, the public accounts might be bad ... but we are investing in the future.
Sun and wind?
Don't make me laugh. Those are hardly a blip compared to good ol' Hydroelectric production in Portugal.
But as an out of fashion techology (no one likes big dams anyway) I guess it's not worh mentioning.
or maybe this is all related to the fact Portugal is pushing really hard to export their wind tech to the US..
Portugal is also, by some margin, the poorest country of the Western Europe and by per capita GDP it's been overtaken by Eastern and Central European countries (Portugal: $21K, Czech Republic: $24K, Slovenia $28K). Btw, since you are comparing it with the USA: $46K. I don't know much about Portugal, but perhaps one of the reasons is that it tends to embark on projects like you mentioned that sound good but don't make economic sense?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Well, the hydros in the new energetic plan were made and are being made to store the solar and wind energy by pumping the water. Because during the night you cannot use solar power and the wind power reduces a lot.
The hydros are not being made to produce energy by themselves.
Mind you, I'm against hydros, but unless we embrace nuclear or someone comes up with huge and efficient energy storing methods, hydros are unavoidable in this scenario. And between burning oil and hydros ... we choose the less of the 2 evils.
Portugal has been working on this for some years now. They will be getting some of the first shipments of the Nissan/Renault electric Leafs I presume.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL0934720820080709
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.
Well, no, this is not the problem. The public spending in these projects, even when it fails is not the problem here.
Portugal's problem, and you can check in the wikipedia by seeing our awful gini index (the worst of all European union), is the very bad distribution of wealth. Most company owners see people as a source of cheap labour ... so of course, if people doesn't earn enough, they also tend not to work very hard. And mind you, the bosses don't pay low wages because they don't have money (like I said they have a LOT OF MONEY), they pay low wages because, well, they all do, and unless you have a very specialized job, if you don't want to do it for what they pay, they find another one to do it.
Another problem, is that, there is a very big tax fraud in here. The proletariat pays taxes because they have a steady income ... the rich don't because the system is made so that it's very difficult to control what they really earn. Portugal it's a great country in some aspects ... but a very shitty one in some others :S
Sadly, only a certain segment of the population believes you can cut taxes and start two wars without harming the economy.
First of all, cutting taxes is generally understood to be good for the economy. Fighting wars generally isn't, so I don't know why you are bundling those two together. 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.
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.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
This would work only for people who confine themselves to staying forever in cities and suburbs, but it certainly won't work for me. Train will not take me from Bat Area to Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Central Coast, Redwood Forest, Point Reyes, Monterey, Death Valley, Mojave Desert, Grand Canyon (both rims), Mount Shasta, and tons of other places in California and Oregon I enjoy going to on weekends the day and time I like. Neither could train bring bags full of groceries to my doorstep. Let's get real. Cars have their uses. What we need to get rid of is the lifestyles and city designs that induce long daily car commutes, build better public transport systems, and build high speed rail where it does make sense.
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.
Portugal exported some uranium ore to Iran during the early 1980s, ammounting to close to 300 tons. However, its mines have been abandoned since late 1980s to early 1990s. From http://www.iraqwatch.org/un/IAEA/s-1997-779-att-1.htm :
However, its mine have been abandoned since late 1980s to early 1990s, mainly because of economic viability and not as much as from puny environmentalist concerns as claimed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Portugal
My sig is better than your sig.
I checked both from CIA world fact book earlier but those wasn't the numbers they had:
Portugal:
76.9% of GDP (2009 est.)
66.3% of GDP (2008 est.)
USA:
52.9% of GDP (2009 est.)
39.7% of GDP (2008 est.)
Though:
"note: data cover only what the United States Treasury denotes as "Debt Held by the Public," which includes all debt instruments issued by the Treasury that are owned by non-US Government entities. The data include Treasury debt held by foreign entities. The data exclude debt issued by individual US states, as well as intra-governmental debt. Intra-governmental debt consists of Treasury borrowings from surpluses in the trusts for Federal Social Security, Federal Employees, Hospital Insurance (Medicare and Medicaid), Disability and Unemployment, and several other smaller trusts. If data for Intra-government debt were added, "Gross Debt" would increase by about 30% of GDP."
So maybe for comparisons your 88% is more correct anyway. What do I know. IANAE.
I don't know much about Portugal, but perhaps one of the reasons is that it tends to embark on projects like you mentioned that sound good but don't make economic sense?
Doubt it. This is an issue you can see in general comparing north vs south Europe. I don't remember the word for it but the southern countries is more about living / spending your time outside of work whereas for many in the north your life is about working. I assume the weather conditions, need to take siestas in the middle of the day because it's too warm to do anything useful anyway and so on may be some reasons for it.
I think one reason economic is better up north is because people simply work harder.
May be wrong though. Also tourism is a bigger industry in those southern countries.
Developing countries also leading the way. Thailand broke ground this month on two large solar PV installations, a 38 MW plant and a 73 MW plant, the latter will be the world's largest when it goes into operation November 2011. Thailand is not poor but it isn't rich either, yet it can figure out how to finance and build renewable energy systems on a large scale. More on the solar race in Thailand http://geomark.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/solar-race-is-on-in-thailand/
Khao Yai Land
And it's probably still going to be talk 20 years from now.
A couple of years ago, voters passed a $10 billion bond measure to get it started. What many of them missed was that this was the first $10 billion of a $40 billion total cost, much of which is expected to be federally-funded even though nobody bothered to ask the federal government for the money. If the state has to cover the entire amount, it will cost $80 billion once the bonds are paid off.
Sure, it's planned to go from San Diego to San Francisco, but it's running into enormous political problems. City after city in Orange County alone are saying that they don't want it running through their land because of the financial and political costs that go with it. That means a longer run through Riverside County -- if cities in that county let it happen -- making it more expensive. San Francisco goes back and forth on whether they'll let it actually end in the city, or force it over to Oakland.
Then there's the time it's expected to take to get from San Diego to San Francisco, a trip of about 500 miles. The low end times are quoted at about four hours, which might be acceptable, but that's for an express train, which are rare to non-existent in most plans that have been made public. Every plan I've seen has the train making numerous stops along the way -- as many as a dozen along the 45 mile-path through Orange County, let alone San Diego and Los Angeles Counties and the Bay Area -- and some reports have suggested that it would take eight to ten hours for the train to make the trip, with it spending as much time accelerating and decelerating as it does in a cruise speed -- which wouldn't be that high in the urban areas to begin with.
It's also not expected to be up and running until 2030 at the earliest. Most of the realistic estimates put it at 2040. It's a total fiasco. We can't even get a simple light rail project that runs 30 miles in place in part because the costs ballooned to more than $1 billion despite plans to run most of the line running down the center medians of the streets (hence its name, CenterLine).
Absent a minor revolution, California will never be governable enough to get something like a high-speed-rail line in place.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
Actually, rail does not. Rail uses electricity when the driver wants it to. That often means peak times of electricity use. An electric car can get charged basically at any time - at night (or mid day in the case of solar) - whenever there is excess electricity in the grid. Rail also uses just as much electricity as an electric car. There's a slight difference but the time of use control makes up this difference. Public transport exposed (article is a graph with nice numbers from a bureau of transportation statistics report - numbers spot checked by me). If the electricity was cheap enough, you could use it to capture CO2, make hydrogen, and heat the mixture to produce gasoline and diesel. However, most renewable electricity is too expensive for this purpose.
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.
Public transport is not any better than the automobile (see above). Let people choose between the automobile and public transport. Finally, the idea that public transport is big in Europe is a myth. The same article links to an Australian study (which is dead) that suggests that Europe uses 0.75 times as much energy per mile on average in transport. While %1 of trips in the US are based on public transport, less than 10-19 percent are public transport based in Europe. Even they have the automobile as the main mode of transportation. Japan is quite different, but even there the electric public transport is not much more efficient than electric cars.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
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.
In Europe as a whole, transportation only takes about a third of their energy usage as of 2009. Much of that is electric since they have a lot of rail, but I couldn't find any better breakdowns.
In the US, transport takes about %28 of total energy use. In Europe, less than %10-%19 percent of all transport is public, and since they have a lot of buses, some fraction of that is rail. I could not find the numbers on percentage breakdown. All the rest is cars. In the USA, public transport is less than %3 of the total. All the rest is cars. Public transport is only as efficient as cars of the same type. For example, a diesel car is the same as a diesel train (in real operating scenarios).
The point is, there's no use in putting off transitioning to direct sun energy consumption.
Yep. I used to think the sun was not a good source of power. I then looked at the data. Most solar panels suck but the sun does not.
We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. - Thomas Edison
All known quantities of fossil fuels and U-235 will be exhausted by 2150 at current rates and predicted growth patterns. We might need it for something else we can't foresee, so the smart move would be to conserve every bit of easy to use energy, and use the resources we have now to make progress in sustainable technologies.
Actually, the oceans can last at least 500 years, and the Japanese are already working on technology to extract the uranium in the seawater. Of course, with crappy reactors burning only 0.7 percent of the energy in the uranium and dumping the rest, we have some major efficiency issues. If we fix it, we could look forward to 10,000 years plus. By that time, I'm sure will all by dead or cruising the galaxy. I think it is important to understand the paradoxes involved in energy conservation, as well as the actually effects of conservation measures. For example, public transport looks to be only a modest gain for a lot of investment, while say, upgrading your house's insulation is a much better idea with real, measurable (positive) economic consequences.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
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.
Most people could quite easily walk to the shops. Obviously there are some people who live 50 miles away from the nearest grocery store, but these are a tiny minority.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Maybe we have low wages because we have one of the lowest productivity rates in Europe. Compared to the productivity of a German, a medium Portuguese "earns" more. And what about the "11-months worked/14-months payed"? That makes all the sense too. Or maybe the fact that we have such a heavy tax burden too helps explain that (an employer must set aside about 1.500€ to pay you 1.000€). Or the fact that half of the economy is in the State's hands. Guess only the "greedy neoliberals" are to blame, not our benevolent (our should I say corrupt?) government...And don't start with the "TVI/FoxNews" comparison, because I pass on watch RTP/SIC/TVI altogether. And by the way, our public debt should reach 110% by next year and our total external debt exceeds 350% of GDP (far worse than Greece's). Too bad the article says absolutely nothing about our energy efficiency, which is one of the worst in Europe. Of course enhancing this doesn't "sell" anything and doesn't make Mexia's (EDP's CEO) account balance grow by another couple a million per year. But if we were as efficient as say, Finland, we'd need significant less energy to start with and maybe we could ditch the whole wind-energy scheme, that's going to burden us for years to come. Don't forget we are NOT paying for most of this "brave new world" of renewables since electricity prices have been set by government to a lower value than actual production costs (the deficits just keep on pilling up, and sooner or later must be payed...with interests). That's why subsidies are then pulled off in Spain and Germany: because it's a huge burden for the economy.
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
Portugal only generates 17% of the electricity it uses: http://energy.eu/#dependency So actually the 45% renewables is 45% of that 17%. Which is really, what, 8% of Portugal's consumed electricity? The rest they buy from their EU neighbours, probably mostly from France who export 49% of their generated power, since Spain don't really output enough and presumable wouldn't *only* sell to Portugal (see same table). I'm not saying the Portuguese energy department (whatever it's called) doesn't try to buy renewable energy from the EU grid, but I don't think they practically could buy enough from their neighbours to reach 45% renewables *consumed*, which is what really matters - especially in a country with such a high energy dependency. And Portugal is a hot country. I live in the south of France and used to live in the UK and I know how much lower my energy needs are here because I pay the bills! It's easier to use less energy in a country where you don't really need to heat yourself at any time of the year. Not to be all doom and gloom, this is a political stunt, but if you want a real success story look at Denmark. Net energy exporter (over 35% more power generated than needed by the country) and 30% of the energy it generates is from renewables: http://energy.eu/#renewable And they want to do better. Now that *is* impressive. If they weren't exporting so much energy then more than 50% of their consumed power would be renewable (though I guess the exports pay for a lot of the investment in renewables).
Why do we see this meme so often? Solar and wind energy is used to produce electricity. Electricity isn't significantly produced by oil, it's mostly coal, followed by nuclear, hydro, and natural gas...
We do use oil as chemical feedstock and for fuel for mobile applications like vehicles. Thus far, our usage of electricity in that function is 'insignificant'.
Don't get me wrong, I'm always happy about staying away from coal and using something significantly cleaner. After all, coal is even nastier than oil. Well, modern coal plants are cleaner than autos, but that's because they have industrial sized pollution controls.
I don't read AC A human right
Then there's the time it's expected to take to get from San Diego to San Francisco, a trip of about 500 miles. The low end times are quoted at about four hours
Seriously? That works out at 125 miles per hour, which is the speed of the UK InterCity trains. They were state of the art in 1976, but in comparison with modern trains (which aren't being deployed in the UK, because we've been systematically crippling our rail infrastructure since the '80s) they're laughably antiquated. France and China, for example, have trains that maintain an average speed of almost 300 miles per hour, and the maglev version of the Shinkansen can reach 360 miles per hour. On a brand new 500 mile route, with entirely new track and rolling stock, there's no excuse for taking more than two hours, and I'd expect it to be closer to one and a half. Once you factor in check-in times, it should be faster than flying.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Depends on the bus route. I got a bus to a party on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago. The bus trip was a bit more than half an hour and for almost all of it, I was the only person on the bus. It didn't go the most direct route, and almost all of the side-trips were completely wasted; no one got on or off at any point along them. A car would have used significantly less energy than the minibus. If I hadn't been there, the bus would still have run but with no passengers at all for most of its journey.
This is one of the problems that could be easily solved with the application of a little bit of processing power. Rather than having fixed bus routes, I ought to be able to go to tell the bus company where I am and where I want to go (either from home via the Internet, via a mobile phone, or at a bus stop) and have them schedule a vehicle to take me there. If there are lots of people going the same way, it should be a large bus, if there are a few then it should be something smaller.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You do realize that computers use electricity, right?
Very little. My current laptop (and most new computers are laptops) uses a peak of 85W, which is above average. If I leave it on and consuming electricity at full load for one year, that's around 750kWh. If it's only 8 hours a day, then it's only around 250kWh. In more realistic usage (not charging the battery, running the CPU and GPU flat out and simultaneously burning a DVD and driving the USB and FireWire ports at full power), it's closer to 100kWh/year, if that. That amounts to around 2% of the per-capita GDP energy consumption for Portugal.
And you're blithely ignoring secondary effects. For example, ubiquitous Internet means that I now do most of my grocery shopping online. Rather than every customer driving to a supermarket, loading up a car, and driving it back, I can order the stuff that I want and a van makes one trip around the city for 20-40 customers. You only need to do this a few times to completely offset the energy cost of the computer just from that one use. I also work from home now, so I don't need to travel anywhere for work - more energy saving. I pay bills and do banking online, rather than having things printed and posted - more energy saving.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Actually the contents of the article beyond the for-shock-value graphic are quite interesting. If you read further down you see that the author recommends to actually use mass-transit where available instead of the car.
The numbers for mass transit efficiency are so low because the average number of passengers transported by a specific type of mass transit across the whole country (not just urban) in the US is very low. This in turn is because even though during some periods buses and trains are full, for most of the time they run empty or almost empty (at least outside urban areas).
A fully loaded bus or train is very energy efficient compared to a car on a per-passenger basis, but there are plenty of areas and plenty of periods where/when those buses and trains run almost empty which lowers the overall average efficiency per-passenger.
However this brings an interesting paradox:
- By using mass transit you are actually increasing it's efficiency since it would be running anyway (whether you use it or not) and by adding one more passenger you decrease the energy usage per-passenger (people weight very little compared to the actual vehicle so one more person barelly increases the energy consumed).
- By using a car, you only increase the car's energy efficiency per-passenger if you carpool: if you take one more car and travel solo you actually decrease cars' energy efficiency (again, from the article, you see that the average number of people in a car is 1.57)
Not only that, but from the article commuter-rail numbers are still better than car numbers by about 25% and this is for US diesel-powered commuter trains only. If you check the numbers for East Japan Rail (at the bottom) which is much closer to Europe, you see it's twice as energy efficient as using a car.
Even more interesting, if you take the energy efficiency for the TGV (high-speed train in Europe), which is electric and travels with an average passenger load of 80%, from here and convert them into BTU/passenger-mile, you end up with 229 BTU/Passenger-mile which in that article's graphic puts it at the bottom, below the electric scooter/trike and almost 20(!) times more efficient than car travel (it's also way much faster).
The whole article does in fact read as a recommendation for setting up more electric commuter trains in urban environments and to cover long distance with electric powered high-speed trains rather than inneficient diesel trains.
As well as being ahead of the game in terms of green energy Portugal also has the most advanced drug laws in the world
In 2001, Portugal became the first European country to abolish all criminal penalties for personal drug possession. In addition, drug users were to be targeted with therapy rather than prison sentences.[6]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal
The first country to back away from AMERICA'S 'war on drugs' - which has been as successful as the 'war of terror.'?
Maybe we have low wages because we have one of the lowest productivity rates in Europe. Compared to the productivity of a German
No, that's wrong, very very wrong. That's a completely far right-wing view of the problem. The all North of Portugal relies on cheap labour. QUITE HARD cheap labour. Or do you think an employee from the shoes/textile industry working 40h a week for a measly €450 a month is not breaking his back for the boss? The productivity rate doesn't measure how are people work, it measures how much that work gives. The education levels in Germany are far higher than in Portugal, so they have many more people doing high paying, high level jobs and that's the real reason they are more productive.
What do you think it makes more money per hour to their boss, a civil Engineer in Germany or 10 shoemakers in Portugal? And now, which job would you rather do? Because from your point of view, it looks like you would like to be making shoes, since after all, that people don't do anything ... their productivity rates are too low.
Portugal has distinct geographic advantages which allows them to benefit from renewable energy sources. Many parts of the country fairly mountainous. So there are countless ideal locations for wind turbines and there are already a ton out there. But what the article fails to mention is that the majority of Portugal's power generation actually comes from hydroelectric.
In fact, in a region much of my family hails from there has been talk, for decades, of building a dam. It looks like it's finally going through and it's going to have a fairly profound affect on the area. I mean that negatively, people losing land and it possibly changing the nature of commerce in the area. A concern I've been hearing for years is that dams increase humidity. From personal observation summers seemed dryer when I visited as a kid to more recently. They get a lot of the hazy humidity I experience in the states. One of the concerns is that it affects the quality of grapes for wine production but admittedly I've seen no evidence to support that.
One thing that's certain is that it hasn't made electricity any cheaper. And from the way people talk, it seems to have gotten a good bit more expensive. But again, Portugal is ideally situation. They've got consistent strong winds blowing off the ocean and mountains. Perfect for wind turbines and they could easily set up tidal generation along the coast. It also helps that a lot of people have left the countryside for the cities. There have been some moving back, but there's still plenty of land, even if a lot of it is farmland, to erect turbines or sacrifice for reservoirs. The country is also quite small making it rather easy to keep the grid up-to-date.
The US is a far larger country and not every state has ideal geography for renewable energy. Certain areas are far too densely populated to realistically build anything like this. In my area there was furor over something as simple as how to run power lines across a few counties. And really, while individual states are comparable to any European nation the fact is that they've come to be far too dependent on the federal government. They don't have the resources or sufficiently knowledgeable state employees to be able to be able to do any of this for themselves. Hell, a a bunch of trees go down and a city will run to FEMA asking handouts.
The NIMBY crowds seem to be much stronger in the US than in most other countries. Choose from the right checklist of concerns, historical preservation or environmental issues, and you can block anything or at least put it in limbo. I'm not sure if it's because other governments walk all over their citizens with impunity, which in some cases they seem to, or if the people can look beyond their self-centered and unrealistic desires to protect their communities from change.