The U.S. House of Representatives, in a rare 309-117 bipartisan vote passed the Sunshine Protection Act to make Daylight Saving Time (DST) permanent and eliminate standard time. Many see this as a desirable and long overdue measure to end the nuisance biannual clock resetting ritual that around two-thirds of Americans claim to hate, but history tells a very different story.
Read more Medical Jihad
The bill is now in the Senate, and if approved, it could potentially be signed into law by President Trump just in time for the start of this coming winter’s shorter daylight hours. Although the Senate passed an almost identical bill in 2022 with an unprecedented unanimous vote, it stalled in the House and failed to reach Joe Biden’s desk to be auto-penned into law.
Now it’s back for another try, but this time it was initiated by the House. However, the roles are now reversed, and the Senate is the roadblock. According to timeanddate.com; “Several senators have already voiced their opposition to the measure. According to Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, it would “push winter sunrises to an absurdly late hour” and “kids would either walk to school in the pitch black or schools would have to push back start times as The Hill reports.”
Why both the Senate and House proposed similar bills to replace standard time with DST is puzzling, considering that Donald Trump on Truth Social, Dec 13, 2024 said “The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time (DST) is inconvenient and very costly to our Nation.”
I only learned of the House’s DST bill in an article by David Catron in the conservative AMAC Newsline. David is a strong supporter of making DST permanent to end the biannual clock change ritual, but he did admit “Most states adopted the biannual time shifts in order to reduce electricity use and conserve fuel. Yet as far back as 2011, a Yale study in 2011 found that changing the clocks actually increased energy demand by an amount equivalent to 100,000 barrels of oil per day.” Therefore, Trump was correct that DST increases, rather than reduces, energy costs.
Read more Trump’s Nuclear Strategy: A New Variable to Peace with Iran?
Based on this second try to replace standard time with DST, apparently not many in Congress or the general public are aware that there were two unpopular experiments that temporarily imposed year-round DST that should be a warning. The first was during WWII (then referred to as War Time). It was intended to increase wartime production, but was unpopular and ended as soon as the war ended. The second experiment was during the 1973 oil embargo. To conserve fuel, Congress mandated a period of year-round DST that was to last from January 1974 to April 1975. That DST experiment never made it to 1975 because it yielded only modest energy savings and was terminated early, mostly because of the unexpected public outcry. This sentiment was particularly strong in northernmost states where winter sunrises can come well after 9 AM using DST.
Although the additional hour of natural daylight in the evening using DST in the warm summer months is appreciated by many, even that positive sentiment can quickly evaporate depending on where people live. For example, Arizona opted out of DST because it is too darn hot in the summertime for an additional hour of blazing hot sunshine each evening. That same logic could also apply to many southern states. However, expansion of Arizona’s opt-out decision would cause scheduling confusion for the other states farther north within the same time zone.
There is another potential solution to stop the biannual clock-changing ritual. There is a collective drive for permanent standard time (in the U.S. and Canada) to make standard time permanent. Most of Mexico returned to standard time in 2022 although northern towns, such as Tijuana and Juárez, align their times with the DST schedules of the USA.
In conclusion, if permanent DST becomes law, legislators supporting it had better be prepared for the public backlash each winter. To me, the less objectionable alternative to stop the clock changing is to end DST. It only became a federal law in 1966 with the passage of the Uniform Time Act. I am old enough that most of my youth through college was spent under standard time. In hindsight, it now seems preferable compared to the recurring confusion introduced by DST. Before that, since 1883, when time zones were first created by the railroads, standard time was the only viable option. They deserve much credit for standard time’s lasting simplicity.
Read more How Europe Grows Gas Tax Revenues
Image: Pixabay