Soccer Dad

Daylight wastings time

Comedian Sam Levenson attributed this description of Daylight Savings Time to his mother: cutting the end of a blanket and sewing it onto the other side to make it longer and then cutting it off the other end and sewing back on the original side to make it shorter.

I've been telling this to my children who are amazed at the wisdom of Daylight Savings Time. Especially now that it's 3 weeks earlier.

The Washington Post heartily endorsed the proposal a year and a half ago:

ONE VERY TINY (but very talked about) provision in the energy bill would extend daylight saving time by three weeks in the spring and one week in the fall starting in 2007, conserving energy and perhaps preventing some crimes and traffic accidents.

The logic being that with more light at the end of the day, people will use less light in their homes in the evening thus conserving energy. Of course, this assumption is based on the premise that people won't need lights for a similar amount of time in the mornings.

Well ABC news reports (h/t my wife) that a study was done (with a control too!) in Australia and it found

Kellogg and Wolff came to their conclusion by studying Australia, where several states extended daylight-saving time (DST for short) by two months in 2000 to accommodate the Olympic Games in Sydney that year.

They compared electric demand in the state of Victoria, which extended DST, with its next-door neighbor, South Australia, which did not.

"Our results show that the extension failed to conserve electricity," they wrote.

"If it's dark enough in the morning that pretty much everyone has to turn on the lights," said co-author Kellogg, "what that means is that that increase in morning electricity consumption is going to be so big that it offsets any benefits we get from the extra light in the evening."

It seems that the study making the assumption that extra Daylight Savings Time would save energy was based on a Transportation Department study

Congress's logic was simple. If there's an extra hour of sunlight in the evening, people will turn on fewer lights. The Transportation Department once did a study saying daylight savings reduced America's use of oil by 100,000 barrels a day.

That study, according to ABC, is 30 years old. (And I'm forced to wonder if the methodology was valid or was the study supposed to make the case for extra Daylight Savings Time?)

Given the way the Washington Post blithely dismissed the concerns of opponents of the extended DST

Some critics charge that commercial interests are driving the idea -- but if more daylight means more consumer activity, that's good for the economy. Airlines claim that the move will sting, but they survived a similar shift 20 years ago and there's plenty of time to adjust schedules. Children at school bus stops would be in no more danger than they would be on the dark mornings of December and January. And Orthodox Jews who've protested that a sunrise past 8 a.m. would mean choosing between saying prayers and getting to work on time need fret only if they live in Alaska, western Montana, some parts of Idaho or that detached bit of Michigan.

Maybe it's time for a reconsideration?

Blogdigger tags: Daylight Savings Time, Sam Levenson, Conservation.