How can one argue with that? Well, Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time can. As he told NPR that the idea that more daylight equals energy savings is a crock.
“I’m certainly not a fan of the idea that it save energy,” he said. “It turns out that every time Congress has studied it, it’s been told that we haven’t saved anything. In fact, the best study we have is from the Nixon era when he went on a desperate attempt of year-round daylight saving as a result of the OPEC oil embargo and he came up with nothing by way of saving except the potential again. Here’s the problem with daylight saving as an energy saver: we tend to want our computers and our televisions and our radios when we want them. More important, daylight saving really pushed Americans out of the house at the end of the day. And when Americans go out of the house, they may go to the ballpark, they may go to the mall, but they don’t walk there. They get into their cars. Daylight saving increased gasoline consumption, something the petroleum industry has known since 1930. … This has been [a] tremendously effective spending policy. Retail stores love daylight saving. Because when we have an hour of sunlight after work, Americans tend to go shopping. The first and most persistent lobby for daylight saving in this country was the Chamber of Commerce, because they understood that if their department stores were lit up, people would be tempted by them.
In 1986, Congress gave us an extra month of daylight saving time. That’s when we went from six to seven months, which is the period we’ve been living with recently. In that Congressional hearing, [the] golf industry alone, these are industry estimates, told Congress one additional month of daylight saving was worth 200 million dollars in sales of golf clubs and greens fees. The BBQ industry said it was worth 100 million dollars in additional sales of grills and charcoal briquettes. … For 25 years, the candy industry has wanted to get Halloween covered by daylight saving, figuring that if children have an extra hour of daylight, they’ll collect more candy. In fact, they went so far during the 1985 hearings on daylight saving as to put candy pumpkins on the seat of every Senator hoping to get a little favor. They didn’t get it then, but they got it this time.” (Note this is my own transcription, not NPR’s. I think I got everything right, but, you know…)
Read the rest of the story.
[tags]energy, daylight savings, time, hour change, savings, environment[/tags]
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Philip Proefrock said
This just floored me when I read it:
“As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they?
“Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat.”
http://cornellbox.livejournal.com/41633.html