Toothpaste Plus Snake Oil Equals Daylight Saving

Congress didn't do its math homework. March 1 was the deadline for its report on the energy savings we achieved last year by extending daylight saving time from seven to eight months. Congress promised the report, and a substantial savings in oil, when it passed the 2005 Energy Act.

Let's give Congress a pass on this assignment. Please.

We have the data. Recent studies have shown that daylight saving doesn't save energy. The most compelling was just published by two University of California at Santa Barbara researchers. They analyzed meter readings in Indiana over a three-year period, during which the first statewide mandate for daylight saving took effect, forcing all Indiana citizens to spring forward for the first time. I hope the Hoosiers enjoyed the later sunset times; they cost $8.6 million. Residential customers consumed 1 to 4 percent more electricity than they did on standard time.

Congress isn't likely to endorse this new math. In 1986, and again in 2005, Congress promised we would save 100,000 barrels of oil a day, based on a 1974 Department of Transportation study of Nixon's disastrous experiment with year-round daylight saving, which estimated that wintertime daylight saving had the potential to reduce electricity demand by one percent. Clearly, that potential has dried up; the recent Indiana study cites widespread air-conditioning use as one new factor in electricity demand. And we wouldn't save 100,000 barrels of oil even if we did reduce demand because almost all domestic electricity is generated not with oil but with coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric power.

We don't need another Congressional report. The statistics that actually fuel this policy appear in several published volumes of House and Senate Hearings. Check out the 1985 edition. As Congress debated an additional seven weeks of daylight saving (it ultimately passed a one-month extension), lobbyists representing $135 billion in retail sales formed the Daylight Saving Time Coalition. The proposed extension, they testified,could net $400 million in additional revenues for the golf industry, and $150 million in sales of barbecue grills and briquettes, just for starters.

Give Americans more light in the evening, and we will go out to the golf course or the mall--in our cars. Congress has never quantified the impact on gasoline consumption. But last March, after we shoved our clocks ahead, gasoline prices began to rise, and so did demand. This was predictable. In 1930, the petroleum industry funded the first statewide referendum on daylight saving in California, correctly betting on an increase in pleasure driving.

The evidence is overwhelming. Daylight saving is wasteful energy policy. But if we force Congress to learn its lesson this year, we will pay. Remember the costly confusion with transportation, communications, and all scheduled commerce last year? The airline industry squandered millions renegotiating international landing and takeoff times when the United States unilaterally altered its daylight-saving dates. Congress has threatened repeal the extension and change the dates again if it finds no energy savings.

Of course, Congress should do its homework. But in lieu of that overdue report, I suggest a history assignment.

After our nation's contentious initial experiment with daylight saving--allegedly to save fuel during World War I--most Americans were eager to return to standard time. Not Sidney Colgate. The soap-and-toothpaste magnate of Colgate & Company, forerunner of Colgate-Palmolive, testified at the 1919 House Hearings on the repeal of daylight saving. Colgate obscured his retail interest by raising the patriotic issue of conservation. "There is a vast saving in coal and wood, but that fact might go without question," he said, setting the low standard for proof that survives to this day. "There are hundreds of thousands and even millions of tons of coal saved annually by this daylight-saving bill."

Questioner: It does save a large amount of coal? Colgate: Yes, sir; there is no question about that.

Q: Used in the manufacture of gas and electric light?

C: Yes, sir.

Q: Have you looked into that?

C: Well, it is a self-evident fact, and there are some things we know and that you know perfectly well, and yet we may not have exact figures on them. I know that in our house we light our electric lights an hour later than otherwise.

Q: Don't you light them an hour earlier in the morning?

C: Yes; but we do not get up that soon. I do not mean to say that because we are of the privileged class in our particular house, but I will guarantee that most of the people . . . do not use electric lights in the morning at all . . . .

Q: Do you save any more coal during the summer if the hour is changed than without its being changed?

C: If you start your light in Washington an hour later.

Q: Yes; but you are not burning electric light during the time this is operative, as you have just told one of the members of this committee.

C: I am sorry that I am so dense that I cannot explain this . . . It does not do everything, and does not save all the coal in the country, but it saves quite a little. I know it was thought so, and that was not questioned at the time of the war, when we wanted to save coal. People thought we were saving coal at that time, and I am sure we were.

Michael Downing's most recent book is Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. He teaches creative writing at Tufts University. Read more about his work at michaeldowningbooks.com

Comments

[LeftRight]

How about we just all move to the sun, then we won't ever have to worry about it again!

[BigRube]

Personally I wish we could stay on standard time and do away with daylight savings time all together.

[Average]

And think of all the people who get confused by it all! Go back to SUN time ALL THE TIME.