I can find no one who can give me a compelling reason for Daylight Savings Time, though I've been making my dislike for it public for decades.

There are several arguments in favor of DST but none of them hold up in practical application.

The most common argument is "Saving Energy". It is of little or no value in non-urban environments. Farmers get up with the sun, not the clock. They work when there's light. If they don't get a crop harvested by sundown, regardless of when they got up, they work by headlights. If the farmer is running a grain dryer during harvest time, the difference in energy used by lighting in the home would not even be measurable on the electricity bill. The same goes for stock (water) tank heaters in the winter. The clock has little to say to the farmer.

And, truth be told, the urbanite really doesn't save much, if any, energy by getting up earlier either. Most urbanites stay up well past sundown regardless of the time. And in these days of flex time, those who get up early to beat rush hour traffic are getting up in the dark so their energy usage in the morning will tend to offset the energy saved in the evening. And even more telling, drive down any suburban street on a summer evening, well before sundown, and observe the number of lights on in the average house. Lights are on all over the average house long before it gets dark, so how is pushing the dark time later saving any energy?

The only definitive study I have found on the actual energy saved was done in California in early 2001.

CA Study - warning - BIG file - 5 meg pdf

Their conclusion was that the energy saved would be "marginal" - between 0.2% and 0.5% - and that was for DDST (Double Daylight Savings Time) in the summer - shifting the clock by two hours. In fact, if DST were to be implimented year round, the greatest savings would be in winter, not summer. It's also interesting that the conclusion was that the significant savings would be in money rather than energy because consumption would be shifted away from peak usage hour rates, but again only if using DDST.

The real reasons for DST are obscure. It now serves no useful purpose. If some people want to get up earlier so they get more daylight time, let them get up earlier and leave the clocks alone. In rural Iowa when I was growing up, we did "Summer Hours". Stores simply posted a sign informing their customers that they were open from 7 AM to 5 PM instead of their winter hours of 8 to 6 (or whatever). No need to mess with the clocks. That option is available to a large percentage of urban workers today. Flex Time allows many people to do their own "daylight saving" by simply getting up and going to work earlier. How simple.

Let's leave the clocks alone.

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