I think that the discussion in this thread is a case-study answer to the OP’s question.
We’re in the same position as @Princhester , only farther north. I’m approaching the time of year when it’s dark when I go to work, dark when I come home. In June, the sun will have been up for about four hours when I got to work, and will set about five hours after I come home. Tinkering with DST isn’t going to do much for that. And it’s even more extreme in Yukon.
HAHAHAHA. No.
This, more than anything, is why Saskatchewan is on one zone. The folks in the eastern area want DST, the folks on the western area are fine with CST, and it’s just not worth it having the discussion to change the status quo.
My dad used to be on the town council, so would go to regular meetings of reps from all the urban municipalities in the province. They had a standing rule: any motion regarding DST was automatically ruled out of order. It was just too divisive, without any change likely.
Part of the reason for our situation is that the meridian which normally marks the division between CST and MDT runs almost smack-dab down the middle of the province.
When he was still writing essays for Fantasy & Science Fiction Isaac Asimov had one on DST. He remarked at the difference in perception, saying that if Congress had passed a law mandating everyone do everything an hour earlier than they had been in this Land of the Free and Home of the Brave the outcry would have been huge but instead they passed a law resetting the clocks which has the exact same effect without a peep.
About 2/3rd want it gone, so a clear majority, but not universally,
Yep. Meh. It used to save a LOT of energy, but now experts disagree.
I agree that DST has often been sold as “saving energy,” but the results are considerably less clear than most people realize.
In 2006 Indiana instituted daylight saving statewide for the first time. (Before then, daylight time confusingly was in effect in just a handful of Indiana’s counties.) Examining electricity usage and billing since the statewide change, Kotchen and his colleague Laura Grant unexpectedly found that daylight time led to a 1 percent overall rise in residential electricity use, costing the state an extra $9 million. Although daylight time reduces demand for household lighting, the researchers suggest that it increased demand for cooling on summer evenings and heating in early spring and late fall mornings. They hope to publish their conclusions this year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
I would be very happy if part-time DST was abolished, but making the US on full-time DST is just, in a word, moronic.
But, changing DST on a whim is a huge pain in the ass for me. Our company makes lighting controllers, and every time a change is made to DST, we have to update a thousand units. Changing to full-time DST is not something we ever considered might happen, so we will need to do some thinking about the best way to handle this (we have a built-in sunrise/sunset calculator with uses the time zone and the current time and DST to calculate the times).
However, how about business usage?
From your cite-
Not all recent analyses suggest that daylight saving is counterproductive. Instead of studying the impact daylight saving changes had on just one state, senior analyst Jeff Dowd and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy investigated what effect it might have on national energy consumption, looking at 67 electric utilities across the country.
In their October 2008 report to Congress, they conclude that the four-week extension of daylight time saved about 0.5 percent of the nation’s electricity per day, or 1.3 trillion watt-hours in total. That amount could power 100,000 households for a year. The study did not just look at residential electricity use but commercial use as well, Dowd says.
Care to support this conclusion?
Yeah, basically it’s one of those “nobody likes what there is, but there is no consensus on what should be” situations.
And insofar as the current Congress, many in both chambers from all four sides of the issue (keep as is, go all-ST, go all-DT, DGAF) are not at all amused that the recent passage in the Senate of a permanent-DST bill was achieved through a procedural technicality with no hearings, no committee recommendation, no floor debate and no recorded vote of Ys and Ns. So the well is, if not poisoned, contaminated.
As for the substance, I quote myself from the earlier thread
Yes, it’s a little like the politicians who promise to abolish, then replace Obamacare.
“What are you going to replace it with?”
“Oh, well, ha-ha, mmmm…”
I agree that there’s been controversy about the energy savings, but much of it appears to be manufactured controversy based on unreliable studies and/or misinterpretations of them.
The first one cited by SciAm can be dismissed as it addresses a different issue, whether there are electric energy savings from DST overall. There may well not be, as in many cases it may increase air conditioning demand. However, the point I was addressing was whether the extension of DST that went into effect in 2007 saved energy. A/C is a much lesser factor, if indeed a factor at all, in those edge cases of March and the week spanning October-November. Certainly, during both those periods, my own air conditioner is covered and put to bed for the winter.
The California study also covers only the March part of the DST extension, not all of it, and moreover, plainly states that electricity response to weather is different in March than in winter and proposes three parameterizations that supposedly compensate. Independently, the California report also stresses the lack of statistical confidence in the results. Finally, another report that sampled electric utilities across the country came up with quite different results, nearly three times the energy savings of the California study. It’s still well below the government estimate of 2% energy savings given when the Energy Policy Act was proposed in 2005, which may well be overly optimistic, but it does seem very likely that energy savings are there, with likely substantial variations by geographical area and within a fairly wide margin of error.
The “saving energy” issue is something of a red herring.
The real benefit of permanent DST would be to the economy. Simply: when it’s dark at the end of the workday, people tend to go home. When it’s light at the end of the workday, they tend to so some shopping, go to a restaurant, meet friends at a movie, and so on.
Yes, permanent DSL means it’s darker in the mornings. But humans have found ways to deal with darkness.
For example: solar-powered streetlamps at schoolkids’ bus stops are not a hopeless dream: they exist and would be workable in most places.
As was said upthread:
This is always going to be an issue for many: in winter there are simply fewer hours of daylight. So shifting the daylight to later in the day will inconvenience some, but will help the economy as a whole. (And there are always those solar-powered streetlamps.)
eta: as many have said, Congress will always be disinclined to do anything about this as the upsides of a change are unlikely to be attributed to the individual members voting on the issue, while the downsides of a change are VERY likely to be attributed to individual members.
Sure.
What is Noon?
Like all facets of time keeping, it’s arbitrary and should be defined according to what is most convenient and practical for the people living according that definition.
(Noon hasn’t been defined solely by geophysics at least since the advent of steamships and railroads, if that’s what you are hinting at.)
To answer the OP’s main question directly - the political question,
The Chamber of Commerce has been applying pressure behind the scenes to keep daylight saving time for over a century. The reasoning - you don’t have to agree with it - is that if it’s still light out when the workday ends (5pm), people are more likely to do things (like shopping) during the evening. If it’s dark out people are more likely to go home. People out and about Main St. for an extra hour in the evening means more $$$ for the CoC’s constituency.
The extra hour of daylight in the morning doesn’t work the same way. Most people will stay home until they have to go to work regardless.
~Max
Noon of course is geophysically the time of maximum solar elevation, as would be indicated on a sundial, which until the advent of railroads was largely defined by individual communities. It was mainly railroad schedules that demanded some kind of manageable standardization. Nevertheless, the division of the US and Canada (and similar things happened in Europe) into broad swaths of timezones still attempted to reflect, on average, as much as possible an approximation of true solar time. It’s when we modify that with unnatural notions like DST that we get into politics, lobby groups, economic impacts, and other causes of aberrant time standards.
I would favour just staying with standard time. Failing that, I’d accede to staying with DST. But switching back and forth is nuts. I also predict that Congress will do nothing about it. Even if many groups support one or the other as a year-round standard, both options have hostile opposition, including from industries that would be negatively affected by any change at all. Congress doing anything would constitute what the political comedy series Yes, Minister famously characterized as “a courageous decision”, which means it very likely won’t happen.
This seems to me to be the big deal. As of now, in enough of the more populated parts of the country, winter days are short enough that it will be dark by the time you get anywhere from work with or without DST, and DST period has been stretched about as much as it possibly can be, and they can throw the small concession of a “Standard” time that is now only in effect fewer than 5 months.
I have been summoned. I’m not sure I can add anything though.