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With biomass plants, the government wanted to ensure that the climate targets would be met. The government set aside 10 billion euros for the construction of 628 biomass plants. Objections to the biomass plants soon arose: they would not be as CO2-neutral as was assumed and there would be more useful ways to use the biomass.

In 1905, the popsicle was invented by eleven-year-old Frank Epperson. He made a drink with water and some soda powder that he stirred through with a stick. Because his mother told him to go to sleep, he left the drink. When he woke up the next morning, it had frozen and the drink with the stick in it was frozen too. This was the first popsicle.

Columbus was looking for a faster sailing route to the Dutch East Indies. He planned to sail there via the West. With the financial support of the Spanish Queen Isabella, his ships left for the West, but instead of finding a new route to the Dutch East Indies there, he found the undiscovered continent of America.

The renovation of the Afsluitdijk will take three years longer and cost hundreds of millions more than planned. This is all because of a miscalculation with the data of the sluice gates, which means the design is no longer correct.

In 2008, the festival 'De Zee komt' (The sea is coming) was organised on the beach. Along a six-kilometre route, people could admire works of art that were intended to create awareness of the scope and consequences of climate change. Great efforts were made to realise the project. Unfortunately, the financing proved insufficient and the main organisations involved were not united.

An analysis by the FD shows that large ICT projects by the Dutch government are still seriously overrunning: cost overruns amount to an average of 36% and the average overrun is 37%. The FD looked at 125 large projects for which the original budget was 2.5 billion euros and the expected costs have now risen to 3.5 billion.