A Word in Support of Daylight Savings

When my Asian-born wife first learned about daylight Savings time (DST), she thought I was playing a trick on her. You mean, she said, everyone just sort of agrees it’s a new time all of a sudden? And the idea is to have an extra hour of daylight-ish time in the summer? Why not do the same by doubling Saturday, and do away with say Wednesday, two birds with one stone?

She was right of course, it made no sense, to the point where some people are unsure what is going on in America. Do we really all agree to set our clocks forward or backward twice a year? In the pre-Apple watch era, how many people were late for work or school when they forgot to adjust manually that faux wood digital clock on the nightstand, the one with the red LED numbers? Did everyone sacrifice a morning feeling like they were hung over just so we could see the sun set an hour later in July?

These issues are not America’s alone to wrestle with. DST is observed in most of Europe, most of North America, and parts of Africa and Asia around the Northern Hemisphere summer, and in parts of South America and Oceania around the Southern Hemisphere summer. The Brits even call it British Summer Time, which sounds more homey than Daylight Savings Time. Asia seems to have little use for the concept, hence my spouse’s initial confusion. She kind of liked the idea in summer, when in Ohio we had a semblance of daylight until 10 p.m., but renewed her hatred for the thing in December, when gray days gave way to pitch black afternoons. Those Ohio winters were no fun, and we could have used an extra hour then. Why not keep DST all year? But it was the change part that seemed to matter, you know, that cheery “spring ahead,” so no.

Now Donald Trump is siding with my wife in proposing to get rid of DST. Here’s why.

The biggest reasons for getting rid of Daylight Saving Time have to do with the negative health effects of losing an hour of sleep. Hormones fluctuate, and sleep suffers for longer than one hung over morning. Some scientists believe the effects of DST last up to two weeks. Sleep loss contributes to metabolic turmoil, weight gain, mood instability, irritability, and increased risks for accidents while driving. Furthermore, many sufferers of seasonal affective disorder, which results from a lack of sunlight during the winter months, are suddenly pushed back into the darkness the morning after DST. That loss of morning sunlight takes up to one month to return with the increasing daylight of spring. There’s some crazy serious stuff, too: the University of Alabama found a 10 percent increase in heart attacks the Monday after DST begins/ends. Similarly, the American Academy of Neurology says stroke risk rises by eight percent. That stroke risk jumps 20 percent for those over 65.

The other reason people give for getting rid of DST is that we don’t really need it anymore. DST was created to save energy. Yet in 1975 DST was found to reduce energy waste by only one percent. By 1976, we figured out that DST wasn’t significantly reducing energy waste at all. A contemporary report found the total electricity savings from the time change was about 1.3 terawatt-hours (TWh; for reference, the total 2007 electricity consumption in the United States was 3,900 TWh.) This corresponds to 0.5 percent per each day of DST, or 0.03 percent of electricity consumption over the year. Meh.

So if DST is so bad, why not just get rid of it, sweep it away in another Day One Trump Executive Order initiative? Because the presence of DST at all, and the start and stop times themselves, are codified by law. It’ll take an act of Congress to change things. Here’s a thumbnail recent history of DST to give you an idea how complicated this whole thing is:

“The Uniform Time Act of 1966 was the first federal DST law in the United States that was not part of a wartime initiative. The Act established that DST would begin on the last Sunday in April and end on the last Sunday in October. Then, the oil embargo of the early 1970s prompted temporary changes to federal DST policy, when the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act of 1973 imposed year-round DST for 15 months. A more enduring change, again with the intent of energy conservation, occurred in 1986, when the start date was moved forward by three weeks. The DST regime in practice today includes a further extension authorized within the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Having begun in 2007, DST now starts three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday in March, and lasts one week longer, until the first Sunday in November.”

There are a lot of solid reasons to end DST, I have to admit. But with all due respect to President-elect Trump and my wife, I’d like to suggest one reason to keep DST.

When the sun set around 7 p.m., nobody really had time as a kid to play outside after dinner. The streetlights would start to flicker on around 6:45 p.m. and that one kid whose mother would open the screen door and shout to come home would hear those shouts about the same time. We needed DST because everybody knows playing outside after dinner is the most fun (nobody knows why, but it is true). Cars had their headlights on, so yelling “car” to hold up play during a street baseball game was easier, so there’s that.

But at least some of it was the thrill of being outside in the gathering darkness, begging for “just five more minutes, please!” to finish a game of hide-and-seek or another inning of kickball or to snag a fly ball coming like a comet out of the looming darkness. Some of us with real baseball mitts used to play catch; the light was helpful at first, but by night’s end a rhythm had been established based on the sound of the ball on leather that did not need illumination. The extra daylight gave the ice cream man that much more time to get around to our street, too. We learned to see in the dark to keep the games alive, keep the ball in play, until at least 9 p.m. when it was, everyone reluctantly admitted, bath time.

I realize nostalgia is a weak reason to keep DST alive in the face of science that says it brings on higher risk for heart attack and stroke, and especially since I am much, much closer to that heart attack danger zone than I am to playing outside after dinner. Still, I hope lawmakers spare a thought for what DST used to mean, even as prudence suggests its time has passed. It was a grand and glorious time to be a kid, that extra hour outside. It’ll be missed.

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