The Myth of Daylight Saving Time?

This post was originally published on this site

Well, here we are again … about to lose another hour of our lives. 

Tomorrow, despite the (very soft) promises of the new administration and the incoming Republican majority, we will have to turn our clocks back once again for Daylight Saving Time. We will only gain it back again on November 2nd. In fairness, Donald Trump and Republicans have not exactly spent their first weeks lounging by the fireside and resting on their laurels. Congress also has a looming shutdown deadline that occupies all of their attention. The hope for some that we had seen our last round of “spring forward, fall back” was always a little unrealistic.

Even if Trump and Congress had any bandwidth at all for ending DST, it turned out to be a tougher task than they anticipated. Trump admitted that much earlier in the week:

“Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation,” the president-elect wrote on social media in December, vowing that Republicans would use their “best efforts” to eliminate the century-old practice of moving the clocks forward one hour every spring and back in the fall.

But locking the clock has proved more politically difficult than rolling back some of Joe Biden’s policies. Polls have shown that most Americans oppose the time shifts but disagree on what should replace them.

“I assume people would like to have more light later, but some people want to have more light earlier because they don’t want to take their kids to school in the dark,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “And it’s very much, it’s a little bit one way, but it’s very much a 50-50 issue.”

It’s not a 50-50 issue; it’s more like a 33-33-33 issue. Many people are tired of clock shifting, but they’re split as to whether to remain on Standard Time or DST permanently. And some people see this as a state issue rather than a federal issue, despite the fact that it clearly implicates interstate commerce to some degree. 

However, there are plenty of Americans who support the status quo as well. I filled in for Drew Mariani yesterday as a guest host for Relevant Radio® and took calls for a half hour on the topic. My guest was sleep-medicine specialist Dr. Lou Tartaglia of the Toledo Sleep Disorders Center, who argued that DST was detrimental to health for most people. Dr. Tartaglia came armed with studies and data that supported his call to end DST.

And callers were having none of it. Both Dr. Tartaglia and I had a great time being assailed by listeners who rebuked us — in good spirits and humor — for our position. They also made some good points, especially one high-school teacher who advised us that teens would be particularly hard hit from the change. It was one of the more fun segments of radio I have experienced in recent memory, perhaps because everyone also understood that this was an issue with passion but also the perspective that this isn’t really a high priority anyway … even if it arguably should be.

One reason for it being a bigger priority is that DST doesn’t actually deliver on the energy savings that justified its imposition in the first place. In a new look at this question headlined “The Myth Behind Daylight-Saving Time,” the Wall Street Journal’s Justin Lahart looked at the most recent studies and found no real savings at all:

Economists have jumped into the debate. Daylight-saving time’s original selling point was to reduce energy use by making sunsets later in the day. New research questions that claim.

Preliminary findings from Yale economist Matthew Kotchen, with Arianna Salazar-Miranda, Erin Mansur and Steve Cicala, suggest that in some places daylight-saving time saves electricity, while in others it uses more, with the overall effect across the U.S. basically a wash. The upshot is that electricity saved by behavior such as leaving lights off until later in the evenings is spent in the darker mornings by doing things like turning on the lights to make sure our socks match.

Separately, traffic-flow data the researchers are analyzing suggest that daylight saving might lead people to drive more—which doesn’t exactly save energy either. 

More driving is certainly the case when daylight-saving time starts each March, which is understandable: A lot of outdoor sports practices begin the week after the clocks change, for example. And Kotchen suspects it is also true across daylight-saving time in general: No matter what time the sun rises, most people aren’t going to hit the golf course or grab a meal with friends before they go to work.

This brings up a point that did come up yesterday. If we need more daylight for activity time, why not just adjust our schedules to get it? The high-school teacher suggested that for teens anyway, considering the early start time unrealistic even with more sunlight. Some business activities probably couldn’t flex as easily — retail, for instance — but retail regularly runs past all useful sunlight anyway. The concept of “business hours” has grown very flexible over the last few decades, and even more so since the pandemic. Rather than adjust the clocks for everyone, why not let people adjust their own schedules to maximize their sunlight exposure as they see fit?

And of course, the irony is that we’re adjusting the clocks to “save” daylight during the part of the calendar when we already have more of it available. The days already last longer in the now-eight months of DST. Why do we need to “save” it during that period, when we could just start our business days earlier and enjoy the benefit of late-afternoon sunlight as it comes naturally?

Alas, we lack the will to make a decision on this, so the decision will be made by default. Once again, we will all have to adjust our timepieces and chant “spring forward, fall back” to remind ourselves of the direction, and lose an hour of sleep. And then we’ll spend the next eight months talking about it some more, only to redo this all over again in November. But in the meantime, maybe this serves a higher purpose; it reminds us of how to debate differences in good humor and collaborative citizenship, and maybe — just maybe — forms us to be better neighbors.

I’ll try to comfort myself with that thought when I have to roll out of bed with an hour less sleep, thankyewverahmuch. 

In the meantime, here’s the podcast of yesterday’s radio discussion on Relevant Radio®. The first half hour is the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, which is lovely, but skip to the middle of the podcast if you only want to hear the fun conversation we had.