In Brief: Daylight Savings Is a Scam
When you woke up Monday morning, were you groggier than usual?
We have, with tongue mostly in cheek, taken both sides of the time-change debate. God Save Standard Time or Make Daylight Great Again. Writer Nathan Stone is solidly in the Standard Time camp.
Beginning with “that pious story of Benjamin Franklin originating the idea as a means of getting lazy Frenchmen up earlier,” Stone notes that Franklin was joking. Unfortunately, now the joke is on us. He revisits some other history and data to prove it.
President Nixon hoped to avert a looming energy crisis; in 2015, Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., the man largely responsible for getting DST extended when he was a mere congressman, boasted that the extension had resulted in $500,000,000 in electricity and 2.9 million barrels of oil saved. Leaving aside that half a billion dollars doesn’t do jack against our $34 trillion national debt and that the United States consumes 20 million barrels of oil a day, the only thing wrong with these claims is that they aren’t true.
An interim report on the results of year-long DST published by the Department of Transportation in June of 1974 found that, nationally, electricity demands only decreased by 0.87 percent. And no matter how much time passes, the facts remain stubborn. A Department of Energy study from 2008 reported that electricity demands only decreased 0.03 percent for the entire year of 2007, the first year the extension of DST was enacted. In 2011, economists Laura Grant and Matthew Kotchen found in their study of electricity use in Indiana that DST — again — increased electricity demands anywhere from 1 to 4 percent.
And forget about DST being enacted to help the American farmer and poor, rural communities. They and rural Americans have been the loudest critics of DST since its first implementation in 1918. It doesn’t matter what a clock, the Kaiser, or the Congress says when you get up with the sun and work until dark. It’s the Chamber of Commerce that always wanted DST, not the American farmer. This persistent, rural opposition reveals the damn lie at the heart of DST: It doesn’t do anything. Americans don’t get more daylight. Plants don’t enjoy an extra hour of sunshine. As the Transportation Department’s 1974 study admitted, “DST does not affect the actual number of hours of darkness during a 24-hour period.” And if the hours of darkness are not affected, neither are their counterparts.
No, it’s a fool’s game we play twice a year.
The only difference it makes is one of health, and it’s a change to the red. Study after experiment after report has testified that DST is disastrous to personal health. In 2020, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine published a report testifying that DST “incurs significant public health and safety risks, including increased risk of adverse cardiovascular events, mood disorders, and motor vehicle crashes.” The reason for this is that it violently disrupts our circadian rhythms.
Because so many more of us live in urban settings with artificial light rather than rural settings, we often forget that we are biologically connected to the sun, the suprachiasmatic nuclei in our brains attached to the 24-hour solar day through our eyes via light. Waking up with the sun is what “resets” our biological clocks, aligns them with the solar system, and is what helps us feel refreshed and rejuvenated. Disrupting that and losing an hour of sleep when we “leap forward,” not only leads to more car accidents and heartaches and less productivity at work but also increases depression, anxiety, and seasonal affective disorder. Currently, two-thirds of Americans are overweight; 29 percent of American adults have been diagnosed with clinical depression; life expectancy is declining; and drug overdoses and alcohol abuse are increasing. At a time when more Americans are unhealthy, adding to the problem isn’t just counterproductive; it almost seems like our dear leaders are trying to keep us sick and miserable.
The obvious solution is to stop playing yoyo with our clocks.
That, however, is where Stone takes issue with Senator Marco Rubio’s legislation to make DST permanent. Why? “Nixon’s experiment with year-round DST in January 1974 became so unpopular — despite initial support — that Congress and President Gerald Ford rescinded it nine months later.”
Stone concludes:
The only real solution is to eradicate DST like the STD it is. Most Americans do not want to change their clocks. And with the increase in interest in healthy living, retro-culture, and more people actually taking steps to put those interests and desires into action, making our clocks align with the sun and our biological clocks would fit like a gold ball in the 18th hole.
