By the time most readers in the U.S. read this, we will once again be officially on "Daylight Saving Time." It's a nonsensical name for a nonsensical concept; there's only so much daylight; we can't "save" it, we can only move it around. Thanks to a rule change and a slugabed Congressman a couple of years ago, we now suffer it even earlier in the spring, and later in the fall - early March to early November, a full two-thirds of the year. Personally, I'd just as soon stick with regular time all year, and put DST back on the ashheap of history where it belongs.
First, my personal objection: I get up early. When I was working I had to get up at 5:15; now I sleep in until 5:30. We (my wife and I) take a walk nearly every morning, and I can tell you that there are a lot of people in my residential neighborhood who are also up at that hour. At this time in March, we're just getting a little light at 5:30 -- finally, after all the darkness of winter, a cheering bit of dawn, maybe even sunrise, and equally important, the ability to see where we're going without stepping in a pothole (there are no sidewalks in many areas) or slipping on a patch of ice. Now, after two or three days of this exhilarating event, it's being snatched away again by Congressman Ed Markey. Here's my view (left) walking on Saturday morning; and
below on the right, what I will see Sunday AM.
Ed, you see, is the Chairman of the Select Committee on Collecting and Legislating Utterly Lousy and Egregiously Stupid Stuff (CLULESS) in the U.S. House of Representatives. When he proposed extending DST by another month on each end, he reportedly said that he "gets up about 7:00" and doesn't see any problem if it's dark before then. But Ed is a lawyer (probably) and a Congressman. He probably gets to work at 9:00 or even 10:00. He may not realize that much of the world has to be up and running well before that.
Now in fairness, I must note that Mr. Markey also believes that the extension of DST saves significant amounts of energy. Others, in the past, have made the same argument but there was no data to prove whether the theory was right or wrong. This led to fatuous statements like this one by Markey's partner in crime, Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan:
the additional hour of sunshine in the evening will help chase away the winter blues,”
(Actually, it's the morning sun that helps chase away the winter blues. But I'm betting that Rep. Upton isn't upton-at'em much before 7 a.m., either.)
I've just discovered, though, that Markey commissioned a study on energy savings by the Department of Energy. It was issued in October 2008. You can see the basics on Markey's website, or you can have a look at the DOE report.
I remain skeptical. Government agencies can be terrible whores when someone who controls their budget asks them to "study" an issue, and they know what result is needed. I'd like to study the study and its assumptions. I'm willing to be convinced; but I'm not yet. And if it's totally persuasive on the energy issue, I still won't like DST any better.
The following was added March 15, 2009 -
Keep reading below for impressions of the DOE study (link above).
First, the basics: The DOE concludes that Extended DST does save some energy - possibly about 1.3 terawatt-hours, or somewhere around .02% of our annual usage. (Not 2%, or even two-tenths of a percent, but two hundredths of a percent.) And this, it says, is with a reliability margin of 40% either way! So it could be no more than 1/100th percent.
Of course everyone is welcome to draw his/her own conclusions, but my reading of the data and methodology hasn't convinced me that the DOE's claim, modest as it is, is credible.
Most important, the savings "occurred in a three-to-five hour period in the evening." Why would we measure it that way? The time change is only one hour; the appropriate period of comparison would be to isolate the difference in usage only in the hour that is "transferred" from morning into evening, and only over a short period (perhaps one week before and after the changeover). The DOE's method mixes energy savings that might be attributable to the time change with savings that occur during several hours when any differences are attributable to other factors. This one factor vitiates the validity of the conclusions. Actually, given the number of variables involved, there may not be any accurate way to make a valid comparison.
There are other questions that might be asked about the DOE data, but I don't want to bore anyone more than I already have, because there is another, more telling point: Even if the estimate were totally reliable, is it significant, or worth the trouble? Of course if you pile up enough pennies, you could eventually have a million dollars' worth; if you stack up enough sheets of tissue paper, they could eventually reach the moon. Environmentalists seem to have a particular fondness for extrapolating the infinitesimal into the ginormous (e.g., "if every one of us exchanged just one incandescent bulb in our home for a CFL," ...); I don't question it's true, but such steps will never lead us out of the wilderness of our energy consumption rate. Wouldn't even a 1-mile-per-gallon change in the average vehicle's fuel consumption produce far more impressive savings?
Sorry, but for me, the disadvantages of extended DST, and of DST itself, are still far greater than its supposed "advantages."
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