Daylight Saving Time Remains a Nightmare
Daylight saving time this year ended at 2 a.m. local time on Sunday, Nov. 3, after being in effect for nearly eight months. Standard time will resume in most of the United States for the next four months, reverting again to daylight saving time, or DST, on March 10 next year.
“Springing forward” and “falling back” every year is not just among the many irritations of modern life. Studies show that mandatory clock resetting also reduces workplace productivity, at least temporarily, and is harmful to your health, even deadly. The adverse effects appear to increase with age, a serious concern with our graying population.
It has been said that Benjamin Franklin invented DST to save candlepower at the end of the working day. But he was joking. Burning fewer candles on a summer’s evening means burning more in the darker hours of an early summer’s morning.
Similarly, any explanation for DST that claims support from farmers and ranchers (as if chickens, cows and other livestock wear watches) is historically inapt: Many opposed it because it disrupts farmworkers’ schedules.
The most prominent explanations center on supposed summertime energy savings. If the sun is shining when most people return home from their day jobs, less interior lighting is needed and less electricity needs to be generated.
That argument was prompted by the “oil shocks” of the 1970s when global fuel prices spiked twice owing to embargoes of crude oil exports from the Middle East. DST may have made sense before the widespread adoption of air conditioning in the Sun Belt. Nowadays, however, DST’s energy savings are highly doubtful.
The lengths of days year-round do not vary with changes in the times displayed on clocks and watches. The number of sunlight hours at any point on the globe depends mainly on latitude (arc distance from the equator, where days and nights are always 12 hours long) and season (the Earth’s poles tip away from and toward the sun as our planet follows its 365-day elliptical orbit around Old Sol).
The Northern Hemisphere begins tipping away from the sun at the summer solstice (on or about June 21). The days shorten until winter begins on Dec. 21, when they start lengthening again. And so it goes.
DST does not save anything. Its onset requires most Americans (except those living in Hawaii, the outlying U.S. territories and most of Arizona) to lose an hour of sleep in the spring, time that is retrieved only when standard time resumes in the fall.
Depending on when you rise and head to work or school, it is dark in the morning in the Northern Hemisphere in late fall and early winter, no matter what time regime is in effect. The days are shorter then; clocks can do nothing to change the Earth’s seasonal polar tilt away from the sun.
But because DST “shifts” sunlight toward the day’s end, it would be even darker in the morning in the months surrounding the winter solstice if DST were made permanent (as some voters and their elected representatives seem to want).
Permanent DST triggers objections from parents who resist sending their children to school on pitch-black early winter mornings. Such a policy change also runs afoul of the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which allows states to remain on—or revert to—standard time year-round, but prohibits the adoption of endless daylight saving time without congressional approval.
Evidence of the adverse health consequences of DST has been mounting for decades; it may take up to one month for body clocks to “reset” after a change in the prevailing time regime. Heart attacks, strokes, car crashes and emergency room visits rise significantly in the days following a one-hour time shift in either direction.
Who benefits from DST? Retailers, perhaps. The owners of golf courses, the builders of swimming pools and the manufacturers of charcoal briquettes and gas grills, certainly. Those benefits come at considerable cost to everyone else.
It’s time to end the madness of springing forward and falling back. Making standard time permanent is the solution.
This piece originally was published by The Washington Times and Independent Institute.