The Algarve’s Councils have set aside more than €500,000 to cheer up their shopping streets with Christmas lights this year.
In most municipalities, the lights will switched on at the beginning of December to get shoppers in the festive mood and boost retail sales.
Albufeira, Faro and Portimão Councils are the big spenders this year, with fiscally embarrassed Vila Real de Santo António reducing expenditure on such fripperies as part of a serious cost-cutting effort.
In Albufeira, the region’s main tourist area come Christmas and New Year, the municipality already has contracted a private company to install decorative Christmas lighting on 30 roads and roundabouts in the area.
Albufeira’s lighting will be on display from November 23 and turned off on January 6, 2019.
Comments
My gripe is the hypocrisy of "Global Warmers" who rage at us all for driving our cars or burning fossil fuels, but are completely silent on this. Similarly they never protest about all the illuminated advertising that serves no beneficial purpose except to big business.
The UK press celebrated the recent revamp of Piccadilly Circus whilst complaining about someone driving a car past it. In a month's time they will be printing pictures of houses smothered with Xmas lights.
I recommend to AL a book "The Human Planet: How we created the Anthropocene" (Pelican 2018). Written by two Professors (Lewis and Maslin) at UCL, it is peer reviewed. And it is the source of most of my views on this matter.
They reckon that we are able to avoid the worst effects of climate change by great changes in our behaviour, but I see no sign of such changes. Their most chilling thought is that our comfortable existence on this planet is put at threat by the world´s population of nearly 8 bn. One way of reducing the problem would be to wipe out 90% of us. The habits of the remaining 10% would not be a threat to the global environment.
The fact is there is no significant disruption in our climate. Climate is cyclical these weather patterns that we are seeing now have happened before. What influences our climate is the Sun, oceans and cosmic activity, which we have no control.
IPCC's assessment reports are in fact political documents written largely by political appointees and based not on peer-reviewed research, but on the activist literature of globalist-funded environmental organizations.
Please research the work of scientists and climatologists that disagree with the nonsense that the IPCC reports to get a more balanced idea of what is happening with the climate.
I have become converted to the view that human activity is largely responsible for those changes in weather patterns and climate which seem to be getting more severe. And I suspect that we have already passed the point of no return in terms of global warming.
It is not the planet which is danger from the consequences of human activity, since it has been through this type of warming on other occasions, and will doubtless survive this event. But it is the survival of the human species which is put in doubt. We are our own worst enemy.
On the other hand €500,000 for cheering up shoppers is a lot of dough that could be used somewhere else.
Bah, humbug!
It is all very well for the Câmaras of the Algarve to oppose the drilling for oil off the Algarve coast on the one hand, and yet to indulge in energy expensive frippery on the other.
Does the right hand know what the left hand is doing?