Saving Portugal and Spain:The situation (3)

This post will be the final post about the situation of Portugal and Spain. In this post I will address some of broader the issues facing Europe as a whole and the Iberian peninsula in particular.

The first real problem is energy: Europe is increasingly dependent on increasingly unstable countries for its energy needs. Some examples: as a recurrent winter tradition Russia is threatening to cut gas to certain or all European states. Iran has just announced (or maybe announced, it is a bit unclear), that it will cut its oil deliveries to at leas 6 European countries. Other countries with substantial oil and gas reserves are in turmoil because of the Arab spring (Libya, Egypt, etc.) . In Europe we do not want more coal plants because of the CO2 and other environmental issues. Nuclear power is not a feasible political option since the disaster in Japan, even though Europe is a bit divided on this issue with France and Germany being on both sides of the debate. At this moment, so called green energy (in order of importance: water, wind, sun and .... biomass) does not seem to be able to cope with the ever increasing demand.

The other problem, which is a bit more local, is water. In the northern countries there is to much of it and in the southern countries there is to little. The too much part can be mitigated by building better structures to deal with water (levies, dikes, dams, preemptive flooding areas etc.). In the south the problems are harder to solve. Spain and Portugal have already entered an argument on the use of a Spanish dam on one of the larger rivers flowing into Portugal. Here the main culprit is the agricultural sector (even though some industries are also large water consumers). It just takes an extraordinary amount of water to use modern large scale agricultural techniques.

Finally there is the problem of indecisiveness. In Europe, and in specific European countries it seems harder and harder to make quick decisions. This is fueling the uncertainty over the crisis and more importantly it is delaying the plans for a way of getting Europe out of the crisis and back in the lead. The indecisiveness is caused by the incomplete patchwork that is the European Union. Fact of the matter is that in many cases nobody seems to know which actor is responsible for what (European commission, European council, European parliament, European central bank, the parliaments...). This then invokes lots of political games, which only make the situation worse. Therefore it is necessary to create a more clear structure, one way (decentralization) or another (Federalization).

In my next series of posts on this subject I will be discussing a more cheerfull subject of solutions to this situation. So if you want to discuss more on the situation of Portugal and Spain, please react below.