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Whether Daylight Saving was an effective means of conserving fuel during the war years, or at any time, has never been proven. Proponents claim that longer evenings conserve energy that would be used for heating and lighting homes an extra hour, while opponents note that schools, dairies, factories and early risers eat up any savings in the extra hour of morning darkness. And all the while, energy consumption in general has grown and grown and grown. The conservation argument persuaded President Richard Nixon to sign the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act of 1973, setting clocks ahead an hour for 15 straight months in 1974-75. By the time the clocks were turned back, Nixon was no longer president and no one could remember any energy "emergency." Similarly, the Daylight Saving Time most of America has observed since 1966 -- the last Sunday of April to the last Sunday of October -- is being extended by two weeks on both ends under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 signed by President George Bush in August in order to "conserve energy." In times of national crisis, when soldiers are dying and children are endangered and levees need shoring up, America's leaders have repeatedly moved the clock forward, as if advancing the hour would help see us through troubled times more quickly. There's really no changing time, of course, unless we greatly accelerate our speed. The amount of daylight stays pretty much the same from year to year, no matter how we set our clocks. Claiming to save daylight by taking an hour from one end of the day and putting it on the other is like cheating at solitaire and telling yourself you won. Messing with our clocks distracts us from the more pressing issues at hand, which is why politicians repeatedly return to the Daylight Saving solution and so many folks fall back to blaming 2 million American farmers for making it easier for 60 million American golfers to squeeze in an extra hour on the links before sunset.. |
 Spring Forward The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time by Michael Downing Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005 As
the millennium approached, legislators in Massachusetts, Louisiana,
Nevada and California introduced bills calling for year-round Daylight
Saving... Representative Brad Sherman confidently predicted that double
Daylight Saving would reduce total energy consumption on the West Coast
by an additional 1 percent, though there we no known American data
about a second hour of Daylight Saving. And no one had absolutely
established an actual saving with even one hour of Daylight.
To this day, Daylight Saving accrues dubious credit for fossil-fuel savings and dubious blame for school bus accidents; it is seasonally cited as a contributing factor in the ups and downs of the Dow Jones and the Nielsen ratings. |
Rural Delivery Commentaries and advice on rural living by Michael Hofferber |