Permanent Daylight Saving Time is an Easy Step to Help the Planet
“This ritual of changing time twice a year is stupid.” It’s not often that I’ll quote Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., but the benefits of permanent daylight saving time #DST are so obvious that I’m pleading with my Congressman Jim Himes and the House to sign on to the Senator’s Sunshine Protection Act of 2023, making DST permanent as of this morning, March 12, 2023.?
President Nixon last attempted this back in 1974, but popular support waned due to safety concerns that children were waiting for the bus in the dark (a concern that seems disingenuous at best given our inability to protect children against gun violence, but I’ll save that for another post). Nixon championed the measure as a way to conserve oil during the gas crisis, and it’s a shame that we failed to recognize these #co2reduction benefits over these past 50 years.?
A search of the topic yields a ton of references to a 2009 Indiana study “Does Daylight Saving Time Save Energy?” that seems to refute some of the claims of energy conservation, leading many to call the debate “inconclusive.” However, the study failed to consider that any increase in electricity usage during daylight hours would be vastly offset by the reduction in CO2 emission related to electricity generation through #solar or other #renewable sources.?
A more recent 2020 evidence-based study, "Daylight Saving All Year Round? Evidence from a National Experiment" examined the impact when Turkey chose to stay on DST all year round. The study found that "the policy has a strong intra-day distributional effect, increasing consumption in the early morning and reducing it in the late afternoon. This reduced generation by dirtier #fossilfuel plants and increased it by cleaner #renewableenergy.”
Our own U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy | U.S. Department of Energy and scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory , provided a Congressional Report, "Impact of Extended Daylight Saving Time on National Energy Consumption” looking only at the modest extension of DST at the time, and concluded:
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This past November, Californians voted to extend DST year-round, with the rationale that twice-a-year time changes cause lost sleep and more accidents, aggravate existing health issues, and yield an uptick in suicides.
The economic benefits of DST have been verified by JPMorgan Chase Institute in a 2016 study that found that the onset of DST in Los Angeles increases daily credit card spending per capita by 0.9%, while the end of DST reduces spending by 3.5%.?
The benefits to the leisure industry are also clear, with the National Golf Foundation estimating $200-300 million increase in revenue if DST were extended, and the EU concluding that leisure sector revenue would increase 3%.
Sure there are a few minor downsides to darker mornings, but these can easily be offset by later school start times, hybrid work hours (commonplace since the onset of COVID-19), low-cost LED lighting, or just not going to bed so damn early.?
The evidence is overwhelming, so I hope that our political leaders will make this morning the last time that they steal an hour of sleep from us. Not to do so would be, well, “stupid”.?