Seeing The Light

4:48 pm, 7/22/05

Seeing The Light
Spoons is introduced to anti-Daylight Savings Time thinking, an issue I've addressed before. Despite the proposal only being thought to impact .5% of our petroleum use (some sources report it at just .05%), Congress is seriously entertaining the notion of extending Daylight Savings Time by 8 weeks...

"The beauty of daylight-saving time is it puts a smile on everybody's face when they get home at night and it's still daylight out," said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., a longtime proponent of extending daylight-saving time.

...so perhaps it's time to review why this is such a farce to begin with.

I want my hour back!

I know, I know: It will be returned to me later this year, when we "fall back" on the weekend of October 29-30....

Can we please slow down and get something straight? There is simply no way to "save daylight." People can spin the hands of their clocks like roulette wheels, but come Monday here in Washington, D.C., we're still going to have sunshine for about 12 hours and 45 minutes. The sun can rise at a time of day we call dawn or Howdy Doody Time or whatever - but the stubborn facts of astronomy are at work here and they can't be wished away.

Congress passed the first DST law in 1918 and repealed it the next year. Franklin Delano Roosevelt imposed year-round DST for three years during the Second World War. In 1966, Congress approved a uniform DST standard for the whole country. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon had the nation go on DST for 15 consecutive months in order to conserve energy. The last president to modify DST was Ronald Reagan, who advanced DST's start date to the first Sunday in April.

I recently wondered exactly why we observe Daylight Saving Time (DST). For some reason, I had harbored a vague notion that it had to do with farmers.

Well, it turns out that DST had nothing to do with farmers, who traditionally haven't cared much for it. They care a lot less nowadays, but when the first DST law was making its way through Congress, farmers actually lobbied against it. Dairy farmers were especially upset because their cows refused to accept humanity's tinkering with the hands of time. The obstinate cud-chewers wanted to be milked every twelve hours, and had absolutely no interest in resetting their biological clocks - even if the local creameries suddenly wanted their milk an hour earlier.

As Michael Downing points out in his new book, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, urban businessmen were a major force behind the adoption of DST in the United States. They thought daylight would encourage workers to go shopping on their way home. They also tried to make a case for agriculture, though they didn't bother to consult any actual farmers. One pamphlet argued that DST would benefit the men and women who worked the land because "most farm products are better when gathered with dew on. They are firmer, crisper, than if the sun has dried the dew off." At least that was the claim of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, chaired by department-store magnate A. Lincoln Filene. This was utter nonsense. A lot of crops couldn't be harvested until the morning dew had evaporated. What's more, morning dew has no effect whatsoever on firmness or crispness.

In fact, the State of Indiana opted out of DST in most counties for decades for exactly that reason: Farmers prefer the early sun to dry their crops before they go to work, and an early sunset to quit work at a decent hour. Apparently, believing that Indiana has missed out on the tech business boom because of their "confusing" non-standard time practices, they recently decided to cave. (Somehow, I don't think that was the problem.) Post-war Japan also abandoned the system in 1952 due to farmer outrage.

Likewise, Arizona and Hawaii opted out because they needed another hour of hot summer sun the way most people need a dislocated shoulder. Living in Southern Illinois this time of year, I'm certainly sympathetic to that point of view, and wouldn't mind it a bit if the heat broke a little faster and we could start the Fourth of July fireworks a little earlier. It's just unnatural to wander around in broad daylight at 9:00 in the evening.

Perhaps farmers should take one for the team - i.e., put up with DST even though they don't like it because it keeps city cash registers chinging into the twilight. Yet the contention that DST is good for business is doubtful. It may help some businesses, but it also stands to reason that other ones suffer. If people are more likely to browse the racks at Filene's Basement in the daylight, then they're probably also less likely to go to the movies or take-out restaurants. And in the morning, when it's darker during rush hour, commuters are perhaps disinclined to stop at the corner store for a newspaper or the coffee bar for a latte. Although it's impossible to know the precise economic effects of DST, any attempt to calculate them carries the malodorous whiff of industrial policy.

That's actually in large part what caused the demise of the drive-in movie theater: DST made it simply too late in the evening by the time it was dark enough to start movies. Families couldn't bring their children out at 9:00, and especially couldn't stay for a second movie. Many drive-ins, in a scramble to survive, were forced to resort to showing porn before finally closing up entirely.

We're also informed that DST helps conserve energy, apparently because people arriving home when the sun is still up don't switch on their lights. Didn't it occur to anybody that maybe they compensate by switching them on earlier in the morning? Moreover, people who arrive home from work an hour earlier during the hot summer months are probably more prone to turning up their air conditioners. According to Downing, the petroleum industry once was "an ardent and generous supporter" of DST because it believed people would hop in their cars and drive for pleasure - and guzzle more gas.

Absolutely. When DST was first enacted, modern air conditioning was unknown. Today, it is, I believe, where a great bulk of summertime residential and commercial energy use comes from, enough so to blow fuses in old buildings and pull down entire power grids, and likely negates much of the energy savings along those lines.

But the very worst thing about DST is that it's bad for your health. According to Stanley Coren, a sleep expert at the University of British Columbia, the number of traffic accidents and fatal industrial mishaps increase on the Monday after we spring forward. (Check out one of his studies here.) The reason, presumably, is because losing even a single hour of sleep over the weekend makes a lot of people a bit drowsier on what we might usefully call Black Monday. Unfortunately, there's no compensating effect of a super-safe Monday as we go off DST and "fall back" in the autumn.

Actually, the study shows about a 1.5% decrease in accidents the week after we go back, compared to a 6.6% increase when we switch into "DST mode". So, overall, we're netting about a week with about a 5% increase in fatal accidents. Indeed, not everybody smiles when DST is extended: When Nixon tried it, there were a huge number of accidents and fatalities, especially children walking to school, as people stumbled around, bleary-eyed, in the pre-dawn darkness of autumn and winter. (The amazing counterpoint being used by current advocates of DST extension is that fewer trick-or-treaters will be run over on Halloween if it is bright later into the evening.)

That's not to mention the efficiency cost of people showing up late or early for scheduled events, clocks left on the wrong time, and other confusions associated with the switch. I can't back this up, but I would even be interested in finding out whether the unnatural break in the natural cycle of light and dark magnifies the effects of "SADD", the depressive disorder some people develop from the low-light period in winter.

Some people have advocated switching to DST year-around, but that simply can't possibly be worth it. We should consider being on Standard Time year-around instead. If you really need the extra daylight, it's easy enough for anyone properly outfitted with a watch and alarm clock to adjust themselves accordingly. It's not as hard as you'd expect.

By the way, you know how everybody says Benjamin Franklin was the first to propose DST? That's true, but he was just kidding. Franklin satirically wrote in a French journal of the astounding discovery that the sun does, in fact, rise in the morning, and that if Parisians were to stop sleeping til noon and rise at a decent hour instead, they would save huge sums on candle wax and lamp oil by sleeping through the night. Back to you, Congressman Markey!

"We all just feel sunnier after we set the clocks ahead!"

*groan*