Fuel? “We cannot exclude having consumer limit measures”

Miguel Poiares Maduro admitted, on Monday evening, September 28, a scenario of imposing restrictions on energy consumption, given the worsening of the energy crisis.

In Renaissance, the former PSD minister acknowledged that the government’s calls to reduce fuel consumption are easy to “ridicularize”, but warned, should not be devalued.

“It is an easy initiative to ridicule, but it is not necessarily ridiculous”, said, in relation to the statements made by the Minister for the Environment, Maria da Graça Carvalho, and the Minister for Economic Affairs, Manuel Castro Almeida, recalling that their appeals arose following a request from the European Commission to the Member States to reduce consumption.

“ We have already had times when there were measures that national governments, in crisis situations such as the one we are approaching, had to adopt much more aggressive measures to impose reduction of consumption and limits of consumption ", said Poiares Maduro.

Faced with what is already happening, the former PSD minister anticipates that soon “harder measures” will be taken. 

“ We are not yet in this situation, but we may be ", said, adding that “we cannot exclude having a more serious situation that leads to the imposition of tougher measures in terms of limits to consumption.”.

For Poiares Maduro, “each of us individually has no impact” on fuel reduction, “but aggregately, at European level, it does”.

On the other hand, former finance minister Fernando Medina argued that “the government, in order to make such an appeal, must say more. It has to be clear about why you are making that call.”.

“ Without giving an explanation that has to do with the need to strengthen the country’s reserves, it seems more like something to overcome the impotence that the government has in relation to rising prices,” he noted, adding that “people do not need someone to tell them, in a somewhat paternalistic attitude, ‘let’s see if it saves’”, since the prices that are being charged already function as an incentive to adjust consumption.

Regarding the transfer of 132,000 tons of Portuguese fuel to France, due to lack of storage capacity in Portugal, unlike the leader of the PS, José Luís Carneiro, Fernando Medina said that he has no “reasons to doubt that the government will manage the country’s strategic reserves properly”.

“I do not see that a government does not do this about its own country’s reserves at a time of difficulty,” he reiterated, stressing that “we have to be able to assess and the government has to monitor very well the levels of the country’s reserves, of the country’s reserves, knowing that in a situation of a very acute crisis they always have a limited dimension compared to the country’s general consumption.”.