Daylight Savings Scam
  photo credit: √oхέƒx™ |
Even on a blog about inelegant solutions, Daylight Savings Time (DST) has a special place. Not only is it an inelegant solution, but it is a bad means to a solution that doesn’t solve its designated problem. It’s a bad answer to a very stupid question.
The idea is simple, in a bid to save energy, make people happier or whatever the logic is this year, we all, save those of us who don’t live in a DST zone, set our clocks back one hour in the fall and then set them ahead that same hour in the Spring. The idea is that, during the months where DST is in effect, we get more sunlight in the evening.
The problem is three-fold. A) For it to work it requires every county in every state in every nation to agree to go along with it, then requiring every person in those countries to successfully set every clock to the right time. B) It doesn’t do the job its advertised to do and may actually make things worse. C) Even if it DID work, there would be far more efficient ways to achieve the same effect.
So let’s take a moment to stop and think about DST for a bit and marvel at its stupidity. If you think it’s a good thing, give me a second and hear me out, you might like my competing solution better.
After all, the true marvel of DST isn’t that it doesn’t work, but that it’s such a horrible way to get to something that doesn’t work.
Does DST Work?
On the surface, even I have to admit that the theory of DST sounds pretty darn good. By giving people more daylight in the evening, they’ll use less lights, less heat and save energy. Seems like a dead ringer.
But in practice it’s not so simple. Does it save energy? Depends on who you ask. According to the Department of Energy, DST reduces only about .02% of our total national energy costs. Sadly, that’s the positive spin. A study in Indiana, which focused on individual household usage, found that DST actually increased energy use by about 1%.
So the best case scenario is that it reduces our energy use by barely enough to move the needle, on the other end, it actually increases it by a full percent. The problem is two fold. First, as the authors of the Indiana study pointed out, “Benjamin Franklin was right about candles… but he did not consider air-conditioners,” meaning that DST does reduce our use of lighting, but increases our use of climate control and other creature comforts.
However, the more obvious problem is that DST doesn’t actually change anything. Moving the clocks doesn’t give us more hours of sunlight, it just moves them from morning to night. Where once you might have woken up in sunshine and came home in darkness, with DST you do the reverse. While this might have been a gain in the age of candles, in the era of light switches, air conditioners and automobiles, there is little, if anything, gained.
But that isn’t the dumbest part about DST. Sure, it has failed in its stated goal of energy reduction, but it failed even more gloriously by being a worse answer to a bad question.
A Different Scenario
Lets slide into an alternate universe. In this one, the government has decided to do something about how much people drive by putting a per mile tax in a bid to reduce oil consumption, lessen CO2, etc. The tax is straightforward, you pay X cents per mile you drive, it’s a flat rate that’s reasonable but still discourages unneeded trips.
However, a few years after implementation, the government finds yet another problem. Despite the tax, people are still driving too much in the summer months. Winter is fine for the most part, but those summer road trips eat up too many miles. The government decides to raise the tax during six months of the year.
They can do this two ways:
- Simply raise the tax during the summer months so that every mile now costs Y cents
- Change the definition of a mile, making it shorter so that people will drive more miles at the same rate.
The second way is just plain stupid. It would require everyone to reconfigure their car’s odometer for summer travel, not to mention that it would require road signs and other markers to be altered for the summer months. Insane? Yes. But that’s what happens you start messing around with a unit of measure.
Granted, odometers and signs are harder to change than clocks, but the point remains. There are two solutions, one requires almost no work to implement and can be implemented piecemeal (not every state would need to pass such laws) while the other requires a concerted effort by everyone just to make it work. Why screw around with a unit of measure when there are ways to fix the problem within the current paradigm?
So what’s the solution for DST? It’s rather simple. If you want more daylight in the evenings, if you feel that is better for whatever reason, don’t reset your clocks, reset your schedule. Businesses can change their hours, people can wake up earlier and they can do those things without touching the clock on the wall.
It’s essentially what we’re doing now, the only difference is that we’re pretending it doesn’t exist by changing the clocks to match the change we think we want to see. The problem is that most people don’t want it, it isn’t implemented consistently, even across this country (go to Arizona or any of our islands), and it doesn’t achieve its stated goals.
It is a failure on every front and we are insane for keeping it up.
The Expanding DST
One thing that has changed over the past two years is that DST has grown. Where once standard time and DST enjoyed a roughly 6 month span apiece, now DST covers 8 of the four months, expanded beginning 2008.
This has created two major problems:
- It sabotages the tools that we used to keep ourselves on top of the time changes. Long story short, we invent our system of time, we invent and implement time changes, many of us get confused by said time changes, we invent devices to automatically update clocks, we then changes times changes to ruin those devices. If there is life on other planets, no wonder they don’t want to come here.
- It’s made it so that 2/3 the year is in DST, meaning that DST is now the clearly preferred time. If DST is so wonderful that we should have it for 8 out of every 12 months, why not just not bother setting the clocks back one fall and make it 12 for 12?
The simple truth is that we invented our system of time and it is our right to change it as we see fit. However, since it is a unit of measure, we shouldn’t be screwing with it for no reason. If DST is so much better, then it makes sense to set the clocks to it and walk away, rather than going back every few months to the old system. The more you screw with time, and screw with the way you’re screwing with time, the greater the probability for error.
We joke about being late for work after making a time change but the truth is that time is very important and and every time we change our clocks there are some mistakes. Most are trivial, but bigger mistakes can happen and are likely inevitable. Sure, it’s funny and fitting when would-be terrorists get hurt by their own bomb thanks to DST, but what about when something else goes wrong and good people, not bad guys, get hurt? Might be a different story.
Bottom Line
Just to recap. DST is a bad way to arrive at a solution that doesn’t even fix the problem at hand. Even if we assume that there are reasons to want more daylight in the evening, there are better ways to get it. The only time you need to adjust is your morning alarm.
The simple truth is that DST doesn’t work and, if it did, we could reach the same goal without having to play the “spring forward, fall back” game.
This is why I hope that one fall we can just not set the clocks back and finally be done with our long DST nightmare. It probably won’t happen soon, but I can dream.
In the meantime, I, along with most of the industrialized world, will be playing the DST game twice per year, once as we change to it, once as we move away.
However, I’m going to be swearing under my breath the whole time I do it.
