Courtesy of Vince Reardon:
Daylight Savings Time is a twice-a-year calendar event.
On Sunday, March 13 at 2 AM clocks will hop ahead by one hour and we will lose one hour of sleep. On November 6, 2016 we regain that lost hour, but who cares. The damage has been done. Clocks are supposed to move ahead second by second, minute by minute. They’re not supposed to leap ahead or backward by an hour.
But don’t waste you’re time protesting Daylight Savings Time. It’s the law. In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Uniform Time Act. Still, not all states are in compliance. For example, Arizona, Hawaii and the US territories don’t observe it.
Mary Bowerman in a USA Today article on October 15, 2015 said the tradition of Daylight Savings Time is rooted in our agricultural past when a few extra hours allowed farmers to work longer in the fields. A more contemporary argument in favor of Daylight Savings Time is that more morning daylight in winter and evening daylight in summer reduce auto accidents slightly.
Bowerman says another more compelling argument is energy savings. A 2008 Department of Energy study shows that during the summer months of Daylight Savings Time energy use decreased by 0.5% for each day of extended Daylight Savings Time, resulting in a savings of 0.03% for the year.
“The savings are small in percentage terms, but in absolute terms, they added up to 1.3 billion kilowatt-hours — enough to power about 122,000 average U.S. homes for a year,” Bowerman says. Still, these savings are small compared to the major nuisance Daylight Savings Time imposes on all of us.
I say, “Turn out the lights on Daylight Savings Time!”
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