Congress should stop saving daylight myths

It is absolute­ly amaz­ing how Congress can take an incred­i­bly sim­ple con­cept and turn it into a com­plete boondoggle. 

On July 14, the House of Representatives vot­ed on HR139 to make day­light sav­ing time (DST) per­ma­nent. Some peo­ple will applaud the fact that most of us will no longer have to reset our clocks twice a year (despite the fact that all our “smart” devices do it for us automatically.) 

This has been tried once before. 

Initially, DST was adopt­ed dur­ing World War I. It was osten­si­bly used to allow more hours of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty to sup­port the war and to “increase effi­cien­cy.” After the war, the con­cept was dropped and rein­sti­tut­ed dur­ing World War II. 

Dropped again, it was final­ly adopt­ed as a year­ly rit­u­al in 1966 in the Uniform Time Act. Hawaii and Arizona opt­ed out and have nev­er observed DST. 

In 1974, dur­ing the ener­gy cri­sis, the U.S. decid­ed to adopt per­ma­nent DST, but the first win­ter of dark morn­ings caused pub­lic sup­port to plum­met. So now Congress, with its very lim­it­ed rec­ol­lec­tion and mem­o­ry, is going to try it again. 

Look, let’s just be real­is­tic. DST DOES NOT SAVE ANY DAYLIGHT! 

The amount of day­light and dark­ness dur­ing each 24-hour peri­od is not deter­mined by the rota­tion of hands on a clock or the chang­ing dig­i­tal dis­play on a watch. It is deter­mined by the rota­tion of the Earth around the Sun and the tilt of the Earth as it makes that passage. 

Time zones were orig­i­nal­ly estab­lished with­in a 15-degree span of lon­gi­tude, with lat­i­tude lines run­ning north-south from pole to pole. Fifteen degrees times 24 equals 360 degrees. Get it? Twenty-four hours in a full day, one full day for a com­plete rota­tion of the Earth. 

Every 15-degree seg­ment would rep­re­sent one hour, with Greenwich, England being the zero merid­i­an, and its time zone would extend sev­en-and-a-half degrees either side of that line. 

But even that wasn’t sim­ple enough. If one looks at the world map with the time zones indi­cat­ed, it is read­i­ly appar­ent that each divid­ing line zigs and zags errat­i­cal­ly because cer­tain town­ships and locales want­ed to be in a time zone oth­er than the one that would have nor­mal­ly been appro­pri­ate. Even the International Date Line, which runs basi­cal­ly down the mid­dle of the Pacific Ocean, jogs some­what because cer­tain nations want­ed to be on one side or the other. 

China, which spans five time zones, rec­og­nizes the same time through­out the entire nation. 

And some­thing that most peo­ple don’t even real­ize is that the west­ern ter­mi­nus of the Eastern Time Zone in Kentucky runs in a north­west to south­east direc­tion, with the coun­ties of Meade, Hardin, Larue, Taylor, Casey, Pulaski and Wayne being the lim­it of the Eastern zone. 

If the time zones fol­lowed the lat­i­tude lines pre­cise­ly, the Eastern time zone would ter­mi­nate in Pike County, and we here in Clark County would be in the Central time zone as we should be. 

While get­ting rid of the twice-year­ly clock changes is def­i­nite­ly a change for the bet­ter, our per­ma­nent time sta­tus should be based on stan­dard time, not day­light sav­ing time. 

Kenneth Wright, Director of Colorado University’s Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory, points out that stan­dard time should be adopt­ed — not DST. 

And as far as chang­ing the time twice a year, many med­ical pro­fes­sion­als have point­ed out the dele­te­ri­ous effects of doing so, even includ­ing heart attacks as peo­ple try to adjust their cir­ca­di­an rhythms to a chang­ing clock. 

If peo­ple don’t like get­ting up in dark­ness or don’t like the short­er amount of day­light in win­ter, then their option should be to adjust their dai­ly rou­tine. There is noth­ing any­one can do to change the amount of day­light and dark­ness expe­ri­enced dur­ing the year oth­er than chang­ing the rota­tion of the Earth, some­thing of which we are not yet capable. 

Hopefully, the Senate will see the fol­ly of this hor­ren­dous­ly stu­pid pro­pos­al and kill it aborn­ing. Better yet, the Senate should change the point of per­ma­nence to stan­dard time and send it back to the House.