Portugal has offered marriage equality to same-sex couples since 2010, but until now had not allowed those couple to adopt each other’s children. Today, the Portuguese Parliament passed a bill 99-94 to allow adoption, ending the discrepancy in what it means for same-sex couples to be married. Portugal is one of the few countries in the world that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation in its constitution. (HT: Joe.My.God.)
Alto Lindoso (Image credit: Energias de Portugal)
Portugal’s electricity network operator announced that renewable energy supplied 70 percent of total consumption in the first quarter of this year. This increase was largely due to favorable weather conditions resulting in increased wind and water flow, as well as lower demand. Portuguese citizens are using less energy and using sources that never run out for the vast majority of what they do use.
Actually 70 percent isn’t unheard of for Portugal. For a few hours in 2011, Portugal was entirely run on renewable power. Yet this was the first time so much was sustained for a quarter.
Portugal’s investment in modernizing its electricity grid in 2000 has come in handy. Like in many countries, power companies owned their own transmission lines. What the government did in 2000 was to buy all the lines, creating a publicly owned and traded company to operate them. This was used to create a smart grid that renewable energy producers could connect to (encouraged by government-organized auctions to build new wind and hydro plants). In 2010, the New York Times reported on Portugal’s renewable energy push that started in earnest in 2005:
Five years ago, the leaders of this sun-scorched, wind-swept nation made a bet: To reduce Portugal’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, they embarked on an array of ambitious renewable energy projects — primarily harnessing the country’s wind and hydropower, but also its sunlight and ocean waves…. Nearly 45 percent of the electricity in Portugal’s grid will come from renewable sources this year, up from 17 percent just five years ago.
There was a massive amount of skepticism over the plan at the time. The Prime Minister at the time, José Sócrates, noted that the nation’s network of electric car charging stations elicited ridicule — including former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Burlusconi who jokingly offered to build him an electric Ferrari. While a totally electric version isn’t available, the fastest Ferrari ever was unveiled last month, and it’s a hybrid.
Some locals complained about higher utility bills or the green economy bypassing them, while others were thrilled. The Mayor of Moura explained that the reason his town got the nation’s largest solar plant was because it “gets the most sun of anywhere in Europe and has lots of useless space.”
So now that it demonstrated the ability to generate 70 percent renewable energy for 3 months, where does Portugal go from here? Oddly enough, it does not have much in the way of offshore wind capacity — only 2 MW. The recent economic situation and austerity programs have endangered not only jobs and commerce, but continued investment in renewable energy and electric vehicles. Yet saving on the cost of having to import fossil fuels will be helpful for decades to come, and as its economy improves, it will have a strong renewable electricity grid to rely upon.
Other countries have been making steps of their own on renewable power production. The U.S. had a record-breaking year for wind energy in 2012, growing by 28 percent. Sweden is looking to have no dependence on oil by 2020. Australia could be looking at 100 percent renewable energy by 2030. Global solar power world will soon be a net-positive energy source.
Austerity policies meant to turn around the European economy and reduce the debts and deficits of countries like Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Greece continue to have the opposite effect. The continent’s economy shrank for the second consecutive quarter in the three months leading up to September, officially pushing the European economy back into recession. The 0.1 percent contraction marked the fourth consecutive quarter that the European economy either shrank or experienced no growth.
Protesters filled streets in Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, and Athens this week, as austerity policies in all four countries have driven up unemployment and led to social service cuts, while failing to address the economic crisis. The protests have taken a violent turn recently, with protesters setting fire to urban streets and riot police firing back on them. 140 were arrested in Spain, where the unemployment rate has jumped above 25 percent. The economies of other struggling countries also continue to decline:
Portuguese unemployment jumped to a record 15.8 percent while in Spain, one in four of the workforce is jobless.
Greece’s economic output shrank 7.2 percent on an annual basis in the third quarter as the debt-laden country staggers towards its sixth year of depression.
Close to 26 million people are unemployed in the European Union while governments cut spending.
A study recently found that rather than increasing growth and reducing debt, austerity was driving down economic growth and increasing debt levels. Others have shown that austerity has put 116 million Europeans at risk of falling into poverty.
The United States has fared better, largely because it embraced stimulative economic policies instead of rampant budget cutting. But the U.S. is now at risk of following a similar path, as the so-called “fiscal cliff” policies that will slash spending would inflict an even larger austerity package on the American economy than any European country has pursued. This week, 350 economists called on Congress to avoid budget cuts and instead focus on investments into infrastructure and education that would stimulate growth and create jobs.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is making waves in recent interviews, displaying a strikingly simplistic understanding of the foreign policy challenges faced by the Obama administration. Last night he did it again in an interview with Fox News’s Greta Van Sustern, during which he declared that Moscow has “Muslim problems” and Russia’s GDP is comparable to Portugal’s:
GRETA VAN SUSTERN: Are we drifting back towards the era of the Cold War?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Oh, I don’t think so. Russia is a totally different thing than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. Russia’s got probably a GDP about the size of Portugal except for their energy. They’ve got problems with their borders. They’ve got Muslim problems with their population. They’ve got alcohol problems. They’ve got a large prison population. They have difficulty with conscripts in their military. They’ve got an outflow of educated people who are going to better places. They have trouble attracting industry outside the energy business because of rule of law issues and corruption. So it is a totally different thing from the Soviet Union.
Watch it:
Indeed, Russia is very different from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But Rumsfeld’s casual relationship with facts and his willingness to declare Russian Muslims a “problem” is surprising from a former cabinet level official.
George W. Bush made it a point after the 9/11 attacks to specify that “Ours is a war not against a religion, not against the Muslim faith,” but Rumsfeld’s statement about Russia’s “Muslim problems” offers no subtleties about Russia’s challenges with Chechen separatists and buys into the language of Islamophobes who advocate that Western countries are at war with Islam and all Muslims.
When not painting all of Russia’s Muslims as “problems,” Rumsfeld casually dismisses of Russia’s GDP as “about the size of Portugal except for their energy.” An examination of Russia’s economy, as listed in the CIA World Fact Book, shows a GDP of $2.38 trillion, the sixth largest in the world. And Russia’s gas industry reportedly makes up only 25% of Moscow’s current gross domestic product. Even subtracting that 25% (bringing Russia’s GDP down to $1.785 trillion) Russia’s economy is still tenth biggest in the world and far outpaces Portugal’s GDP of $246.9 billion.
Mark Kleiman makes the case that there’s less than meets the eye to Portugal’s drug decriminalization and it doesn’t really tell us much about drug policy options:
Simple drug use rarely leads to incarceration. There’s not much evidence that the threat of arrest does much to discourage potential users. “Decrim” laws are generally passed in places where there already wasn’t much anti-user enforcement. According to the Cato analysis by Glenn Greenwald purporting to show that Portugal’s policy change was a success, Portuguese police made between 1500 and 2500 drug-possession arrests per year in the period before decriminalization. That’s out of a population of 10 million. The reported rate of illicit drug use is something over 3%, suggesting that the annual risk of arrest for Portuguese illicit-drug users was something under 1%. Neither the Greenwald report, nor the study by Hughes and Stevens published in the British Medical Journal gives any figures on criminal penalties for users, but Greenwald reports that the annual number of administrative proceedings against users after the new law has been more than twice as great as the number of possession arrests before the law. Has the overall deterrent against drug use gone up, or down? It’s hard to say.
Overwhelmingly, drug enforcement is directed at dealers, not users. Decrim doesn’t change anti-dealer enforcement at all. It therefore doesn’t make drugs cheaper or easier to get. So it doesn’t provide much of a test of the effect of legalization on consumption. By the same token, it doesn’t reduce the arrest and incarceration of dealers, crime incident to the markets, or crime by users to get money for drugs. (Insofar as consumption goes up, all those things tend to get worse, not better.)
This is a very enlightening analysis from Kleiman, but I’m not sure why it’s presented with so much scorn and so little praise for decriminalization of possession. Rarely enforced criminal penalties for drug possession are, on this telling, basically nothing but an invitation to abusive selective enforcement. One might think that despite the lack of practical enforcement, theoretical criminal penalties for possession had some large deterrent effect that improves public health. But the Portugese experience seems to indicate that that’s not the case. And, indeed, Kleiman’s bottom line is that “I’m for decriminalization, not just of cannabis, but of other drugs as well.” So—great!—let’s do it.
Brad DeLong brings the snark:
I hear that the Republican Party plans next week to rename the Democratic Party the “Democratic Socialists” . . . And to rename themselves the “National Socialists.”
On a related note, I recently learned that in Portugal the main parties are the Social Democrats on the right and the Socialist Party on the left.
Via Robert Farley, something’s going down in Guinea-Bissau:
Army troops shot dead the president of the tiny west African country of Guinea-Bissau early Monday, following a bomb attack that killed the army chief of staff, according to diplomats in the region.
News reports said army troops blamed the president, João Bernardo Vieira, for the death of the army chief, Gen. Batista Tagme Na Wai, who died in an explosion on Sunday night. Diplomats, who spoke in return for anonymity under customary rules, said the president was killed at around 5 a.m. in an attack outside his house and the country’s borders had been closed. “Nobody knows who is in charge,” one diplomat said. “Nobody knows what the army will do.”
The reason the country is so tiny is that there was an itty-bitty Portugese colony here squeezed between the French colonies of Senegal and Guinea. My sense is that though having been colonized has done little good for anyone, my sense is that the post-colonial experience of Portugal’s former colonies in Africa has been worse than that of the French or British colonies.
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