The practice of shifting clocks twice a year is an annoyance to everyone. Its roots go back to the Enlightenment, when such luminaries as Ben Franklin suggested the practice in part to keep urbanites, who lived by the clock, in better summertime sync with the rural majority who lived by the sun.
Back in 1973, the Nixon administration tried out a year-round daylight savings time as an energy conservation measure. To sleep-late senators, it seemed to make sense: You don’t turn on lights until an hour later in the evening. But children (including myself) got up hours before dawn to walk to the school bus stops in the dark. People were turning lights on in the morning, and often forgetting to turn them off because it was still dark when they left for work. The net result was more accidents and no energy savings.
The current administration is showing its usual regard for history and the scientific process as it decided in 2005 to expand daylight savings time by a month in order to see if it saves energy.
That’s this coming Sunday, March 11th, folks! No more April Fools through Halloween, but rather starting and ending a couple of weeks closer to December.
How many farmers do you suppose still can’t afford a clock? I’ve always been in favor of getting rid of this seasonal affectation, this semi-annual cause of universal confusion. Some rural states had done away with it (like Indiana), but now have caved to peer pressure. Every pro-DST argument I’ve seen seems to be based on a vague “it could save energy” basis. The initial idea was that businesses can use natural daylight for an extra hour, saving on lighting (originally candles). When is the last time you noticed lights turned off in an office or factory because the sun was shining?
According to every measurement done every time they change the DST rules, it hasn’t affected energy consumption in any significant way.
Costs are easier to compute than the benefits. In IT, DST costs a minimum of $200,000,000.00 per year (http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4609 [1]) in the U.S. It is probably closer to a billion dollars once untracked labor costs are figured in. This IT-only cost is already comparable to the dollar value of energy savings that the DOE hopes might be realized.
This wiki [2] provides some concise pro- and anti- discussion of the issue.
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