Almost a century ago, a letter-writer to the New York Times compared daylight saving to "cheating yourself at solitaire and telling yourself you won."
That's the point of daylight saving -- to pretend you're beating the clock and besting nature while you sit on a still-sunny beach at 8:00 p.m. in the middle of July. Even though you sort of know it's actually only 7:00 p.m.
This deception might be benign. It might even be beneficial. But to get in on this bargain, do we have to go on buying the preposterous idea that we are saving 100,000 barrels of oil with every additional day of daylight saving, which Congress has been peddling since 1975?
For the record, a 1975 Department of Transportation (DOT) report estimated that daylight saving could reduce domestic electricity consumption by one percent per day. If this optimistic goal is ever achieved (we've never come close), it will have no positive impact on our consumption of oil. More than 95 percent of our electricity is produced with coal, hydroelectric, and nuclear power.
Plus, while electricity use often does fall during the first month or two, it actually increases over the whole daylight-saving period. A superb analysis of electricity demand in Indiana after the statewide adoption of daylight saving in 2006 (conducted by Matthew Kotchen of U.C. Santa Barbara) demonstrated that Hoosiers had paid more than $8 million for their extra hour of evening sun.
Congress commissioned a separate Department of Energy study in 2007, after extending the daylight -- saving period to eight months. (Oddly, we now spring forward in wintertime.) DOE turned up an electricity-saving of 0.46 to 0.48 percent.
This good news -- half of one percent is not nothing -- was tempered by a few confusing caveats. The electricity saving only applied to the four additional weeks of daylight saving -- three in March and one in November. Over the full eight-month period, daylight saving was likely a net loser thanks, in part, to our reliance on air-conditioning in the summer. And the DOE study pointedly excluded the effect on demand for heating fuels, which surely increased during those four weeks, as sunless winter mornings make for colder homes, schools, and offices.
Most confusing of all, DOE reported no significant change in gasoline consumption. Just one year earlier, economist Peter Tertzakian had identified a one-percent jump in gasoline demand, which added up to 266,000 additional barrels of imported crude per day of extended daylight saving--that's real oil, not the hypothetical DOT variety.
Who's fooling whom? Since the 1930s, the petroleum industry has known that daylight saving increases driving and demand for gasoline. It's no secret that when Americans go to the beach, or, mall, or ballpark on sunlit evenings, we don't walk.
The National Association of Convenience Stores -- whose 100,000-plus locations account for three-quarters of all the gasoline sold in this country -- isn't trying to fool anyone. It stages an annual event on Capitol Hill, which the lobby itself bills as "a thank-you to Congress for federal adoption of daylight saving."
The point is, I'm not feeling so grateful. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for a long summer days at the beach.
But it is March, and it is cold here in New England, and I'm mindful of the Native American who concluded that daylight saving time is like cutting an inch off the bottom of your blanket and sewing it to the top to make the blanket longer.
As a national energy policy, this seems like a foolish waste of time.
Michael Downing is the author of "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time" and many other books, including a new memoir, "Life with Sudden Death." He teaches creative writing at Tufts University. You can read more about his work at michaeldowningbooks.com
so this week
residents of az are 1 hour ahead of cali
monday we we be on the same time
if we in az can do it why cant the rest
According to the DST expert Rachel interviewed, DST actually angered the farmers. He said their most critical hours for getting product to early market was between 6am and 9am, so It actually robbed them of one of those critical hours.
After watching Rachel's fairly long report on the subject, I still don't know why we do this. The folks in Arizona, and one other state I've forgotten, are much smarter. They don't observe DST.
In the mid 1980's I lived in S. Florida for a few years. It was really weird to have it be 80 degrees, but get dark at 5:00 on the shortest days.
As for having the extra daylight in the summer, why not have it in the winter?
When your working hours are from 7AM to 4PM, and you figure in commuting time, I was always leaving for work in the dark, and getting home in the dark in the Winter months. That's why it never made much sense to me, but if it helps the kids I can see it.
Under traditional time, you divide the time between sunrise and sunset where you happen to be by 12 hours. (like a sun dial does). Winter or summer, each day of daylight has 12 hours, but if you are in the northern hemisphere, winter hours are much shorter than summer hours. That way the standard work day of 8 hours would always leave at least four hours of sunlight, summer or winter, for everyone to use.
Summer used to have long hours, winter short hours, and at every change in latitude there would be different lengths of hours, and it wasn't until standard time that everybody started to lose their proportion of daylight and caused the avalanche of sleep disorders we are still living with.
It used to be argued that we needed standard time for industrial purposes, but these days we measure time in Einstein terms, i.e. because there is a difference in velocity between Earth and our satellites, and our interplanetary probes, there is a difference in the subjective passage of time between all of these, so time appears to go slower, and clocks compared to clocks on earth go slower, for example, on our deep space probes. Our systems can handle this bizarre reality, surely they could handle a reversion to sun time.
And please, don't drag Einstein into this. Most timekeeping systems reference atomic clocks on the Earth's surface, and therefore don't need to make any relativistic corrections at all (TAI is already corrected for gravitational time dilation). The very few cases where it does make a difference (namely, GPS) are tuned so that they also maintain the correct time. It really isn't that much of a challenge, especially since it is irrelevant to most users (the time rate difference between Earth's surface and the GPS satellites averages 34 millionths of a second per day).
The complete and total impracticality of standard time, which in essence is a great game pretending the entire population of earth lives right on the equator and has earth itself has a 0% axial tilt, when our human bodies know different and express their disagreements with attempts to live in this manner, is not in the eye of the beholder, it is uncontroversial fact. We are besieged with an avalanche of maladies directly related to adhering to this completely and totally impractical dictate of the nineteenth century train schedule.
By the way, an atomic clock in Canada goes relatively slower than such a clock in the contiguous United States, and that clock in the United States goes relatively slower than such a clock on the equator.
We have become quite good with measuring time, and adjusting for relativistic time. There is nothing preventing us from returning to the time system we enjoyed for all of history before standard time, the time taken from the sun, which is how our bodies measure it, except of course nineteenth century train schedules and the remnants of their philosophy, such as you expressed here. Modern technology finds relativistic time a breeze, it is not as if we cannot program it in.
short evening at home..