On Sunday March 13 most Americans resumed daylight saving time (DST), and moved their clocks ahead by one hour. The U.S. will resume standard time in November, when the clocks get pushed back by an hour. Like nearly 75 percent of Americans, I feel that we should do away with the practice of changing our clocks.
I may actually get my wish, as Senator Marco Rubio (A Republican from Florida) recently introduced a bill called the “Sunshine Protection Act of 2021.” This bill, which passed the Senate via a unanimous consent agreement, would stop the practice of changing our clocks twice a year in the United States. This bill works specifically by repealing Section 3 of the Uniform Time Act of 1966, effectively ending the practice of changing our clocks twice a year. Against all odds, Marco Rubio finally proposed a law that will help the American people. Daylight saving time is an antiquated practice, and it needs to go.
To understand DST, it’s important to know the practice’s history. Daylight saving time has been a common practice for a little over a century at this point. It was first thought of by Benjamin Franklin in 1784. His proposal suggested that Paris’ citizens should wake up earlier in the day to avoid wasting lamp oil at night. Franklin’s proposal is seen by many as a joke, but it’s still the first written account of a suggestion to implement daylight saving time. The first serious proposal for daylight saving time came from George Hudson in 1895. Hudson proposed DST with the intention of allowing people to have more daylight during summer evenings and more daylight during winter mornings. Hudson was ridiculed when he proposed this idea, and his peers said that “calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time.”
Despite heavy criticism, Hudson’s idea was later picked up a few decades later. DST was used by the United States, Germany, France and other warring nations during World War I. By encouraging citizens to spend more time outside in the warm summer months, these nations hoped to conserve coal for the war effort. The next significant event in daylight saving time’s history is the 1966 Uniform Time Act. This law created the daylight saving system we have in America, where we lose an hour of daylight in the spring and gain an hour of daylight in the fall (the specific day on which we change our clocks on was later adjusted by President George Bush in 2007). The Uniform Time Act applied to all U.S. states, but some have since opted out (Hawaii and Arizona [but not the Navajo Nation within it]). Not all countries observe DST either; the practice is only common in the European Union, the U.S. and Canada.
One argument in favor of the observation of daylight saving time is that it saves energy, as it encourages people to stay out later in the warm months and thus use less energy in their homes. However, with the development of technology human behavior has changed. The advance of technology means that people are using their TVs and air conditioning systems regardless of the time of day and outside temperature, and thus the electricity savings that DST was intended to bring are now negligible. It’s been found that DST only saves about 0.03 percent of America’s total electricity use annually. While this is a non-zero number, it’s not significant enough to merit the inconvenience that changing the clocks brings. DST has also been linked to a myriad of health problems. Changing the time is linked to heart attacks, cardiovascular disease risk and metabolic syndrome among other ailments. Additionally, sleep deprivation and lower worker productivity are common the week after the clock changes. This lower worker productivity is particularly significant, as it’s been estimated that a loss of $480 billion in knowledge worker productivity occurs the week after the clock changes.
The Sunshine Protection Act is the most recent in a long line of anti-DST legislation. More than a dozen states have passed legislation or resolutions that end the observation of DST. This bill hasn’t become law yet, and it’s becoming increasingly unclear if it will. Some sources cite the bill’s “bipartisan support” as a positive sign for its passage into law, while others have cited some legislator’s concerns about “children going to school in the dark” as a negative sign for its passage into law. Either way, this law must now pass through the democratically controlled House of Representatives before it lands on President Biden’s desk to be signed. I’m heavily in support of the Sunshine Protection Act, and like Marco Rubio said, “This is an idea whose time has come.”
