I like DST and wish we had it year round. 
They didn’t have TV when DST was instituted. Anyway, I agree that only when energy was really an issue would it matter. I’m trying to imagine WWII when so much was rationed and cooking oil was recycled–and these guys are playing baseball? It’s just a WAG. Maybe that, and all activities in spring and summer requiring electric light use.
It is all about the OIL! See here:
Daylight Saving Time - Incidents and Anecdotes (page 6)
Oil Conservation
… the U.S. Department of Transportation found that observing Daylight Saving Time in March and April saved the equivalent in energy of 10,000 barrels of oil each day - a total of 600,000 barrels in each of those two years.
… Adding the entire month of April to Daylight Saving Time is estimated to save the U.S. about 300,000 barrels of oil each year.
Also about the war on Terror (from the same site):
In September 1999, the West Bank was on Daylight Saving Time while Israel had just switched back to standard time. West Bank terrorists prepared time bombs and smuggled them to their Israeli counterparts, who misunderstood the time on the bombs. As the bombs were being planted, they exploded—one hour too early—killing three terrorists instead of the intended victims—two busloads of people.
I found this by googling Ben Franklin daylight saving time because I thought he was connected to DST. He was an early proponent.
FWIW there are certainly many undocumented and uncounted expenses associated with the shifting. Right now I’m struggling with datalogger software that appears to use all aspects of the PC clock except its DST state, so it says the time’s wrong by an hour and has noplace to override that time. Tech support says the usual “gee, that’s funny, haven’t heard of this before, try reinstalling”.
In fact, I think I’ve had at least one runaround or hassle every single spring and fall, and maybe I’ll start having two of them in the fall, one when the politicians say to change it, and another on the date that the politicians used to say to change it, because of automatic systems using the obsolete rule.
Well, it says here that the U.S. consumes 19.6 million barrels of oil per day. So the savings is a whopping 0.004 %. :eek:
One point which seems to have been lost by some posters: The savings for DST are not made at the time of the switch-over, they are made later (in spring) and earlier (in the fall). We revert to local standard time only once DST no longer makes a saving. Observations to the effect that we gain an hour of daylight in the p.m. but lose it again in the a.m. are not really relevant.
The quote seems to use the same numbers as quoted in my post (#9) above, so it would refer to saving 600,000 barrels of oil in 1974 and 1975, not in the 2000s. I’m not sure what the percentage difference will turn out to be.