Stop all the clocks

The Economist

On Patagonian time

No farther from the equator than are Los Angeles or Beirut, Buenos Aires is hardly known as a land of midnight sun. But at 10pm in the southern hemisphere summer, it is still not dark in Argentina's capital. For this eerie illumination, porteńos can thank Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the country's new president. She decreed that the clocks should go forward by an hour on December 30th for eleven weeks in a desperate attempt to allay energy shortages.

Its geographical position suggests that most of Argentina should be four hours behind Greenwich Mean Time. But it has been only three hours behind for most of the period since 1969, when a military government made summer time last the whole year. Now it is just two hours behind, until mid-March.

The shift is intended to forestall further electricity blackouts—a big power cut left much of Buenos Aires in the dark earlier this month. The cause of the energy shortage is simple: four years of price controls under Ms Fernández's husband, who preceded her in the presidency, have left average energy costs a third below those of neighbouring countries, boosting demand and discouraging investment in supply.

The new time has provoked grumbles in western Argentina, where it remains dark at 7am and clocks now run three hours ahead of Boston, on a similar longitude. “Everyone's complaining about it,” says Mauricio Llaver, a journalist in Mendoza. “You never fall asleep before 1am, and then you wake up exhausted in the morning, and it's still dark outside. One of the pleasures of summer used to be waking up to the songbirds. Not any more.” There is similar grumbling about newly-dark mornings in Patagonia in the south, Ms Fernández's adopted home region. The early signs are that the switch may not save energy.

Ms Fernández is not alone in fiddling with time. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's populist president with whom she is friendly, decreed last month that his country's clocks should go back by half an hour permanently. The change, aimed at ensuring children go to school in daylight, “affects even the biological functioning of the body,” said Mr Chávez. Maybe, but the result is that Caracas is now two and a half hours behind Mendoza, which is further west. It's enough to make the condors drop out of the sky in confusion.

Source: The Economist