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Archive for October 26th, 2008

Renewable corruption

By: psr, 2008-10-26

The October 24, 2008 edition of Spanish financial newspaper “Expansión” reports that the Ministry of Industry is investigating fraudulent practices in renewable energy subsidies.

What a surprise. How naive can the Ministry be?

The desire to promote renewable energy at all cost, almost obsessively, has drawn governments to offer juicy subsidies on any attempt to research or produce energy from new sources. It is all framed, of course, in the human-caused climate change dogma, which ought to make humans change our habits.

How to implement such change? By pouring loads of public money in subsidies for private companies, to make new businesses with energy sources (wind, solar, bio-fuels) which will supposedly help the planet.

There are two basic problems with such policy:

It is nonsense to think that those energy sources can …

2008-10-26 | Economy - Spain | Trackback | 1 Comment »

Back to GMT+1, waiting for GMT+0

By: psr, 2008-10-26

Tonight (Oct 25 to Oct 26) is the end of DST (Daylight Savings Time), which has kept central Europe artificially in GMT+2, commonly known as CEST (Central European Summer Time), and we’ll go back to the usual timezone, called “CET”, or Central European Time, or GMT+1.

Along with central europe goes Spain, which however is geographically far from “central” europe, and thus we ought to be using a different timezone. GMT+1 is not right for Spain. At 7am there is sunlight coming through your window in Rome or in Zurich, while in Spain it’s pitch dark. At that time, it ought to be 6am in Spain, or GMT+0, the same time as in Portugal or the United Kingdom, our meridian neighbours.

I encourage all readers to advocate …