Congress wants daylight-saving time change to save oil

I'd agree with them if it was say, 1899.

As the world grows technologically, and as we constantly move toward a 24hr oriented world, daylight savings means less and less.

-m.

 

Agreed. As it is, near the end of daylight savings the sun rises pretty late.. I have enough trouble waking up in November as it is!

That would make standard time only 3 months long.. might as well just save everyone the trouble and just reassign daylight savings time all year round. Now we know what lawmakers are doing when they say they can't agree on anything substantial.

 

Congress has apparently forgotten the real reason for Daylight Savings Time. That was to insure that schoolage children had daylight to and from school. ( Not for Farmers, they hate it, disrupts milking ) They would be better off attacking waste, in all forms, to save Energy.

 

Year-round DST was tried decades ago. It was abandoned after several kids were killed by pre-dawn winter traffic. Of course there are more people now, so maybe that would not be perceived as such as problem.

 

How fickle we all are! Our collective memories are very short. Remember back to 1973 and the so-called "energy crisis." We went to daylight time in midwinter - we all went to school or work in the dark and the sun did not rise until after 0800 local time. Many complaints and concerns.

On the other hand, look at Russia where time is advanced one hour in all 10 time zones year round. The concept of daylight saving time only applies to midlatitude areas (30° to 66° N & S), never to latitudes greater than 66° (polar zones, 6 months of light, 6 months of dark) or the equatorial regions (30°N to 30°S, same amount of day and night year round). The US has 8 time zones (Aleutian, Hawaii-Alaska, midPacific, Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern and Atlantic). Only 4 count for the majority of people: Pacific, Mountain, Central and Eastern.

Daylight Saving Time was adopted in the US during WWI. During WWII Daylight time was used nationally throughout the entire period of February 1942 to October 1945 and was known as "war time." During the same time period the United Kingdom used a double daylight saving time in which clocks were running two hours ahead of Coördinated Universal Time. This practice was desirable because of the long summer days at higher latitudes. Nations whose time is advanced by one hour throughout the entire year are Spain, France, Netherlands, Belgium and Russia.

Bottom line: we can fiddle with the clocks all we want (except Indiana and Arizona which always remain on standard time), but national security and uncommon sense calls for maximizing fuel economy standards per the Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org), funding modern transportation systems (MagLEV) and maximizing use of photovoltaics on every roof, windmills, more efficient hydroelectricity and more thermally efficient construction. I see photovoltaic hybrids appearing sooner than later.

 

What a bunch of idiots we have elected. They fiddle (with the clock) while the country is burning (through too much oil). No real solutions - just pointless acts with probably no actual proof of energy savings. Most businesses are fully illuminated all day because hardly anyone takes advantage of natural daylighting.

It would be comical if it weren't so sad.

 

Congress is technologically stupid.

Better they write a law that the earth must no longer tilt 23½ degrees but be vertical to the path of its orbit. Then both hemispehere would get the same amount of sunlight and we wouldn't have to worry about the changing length of our daylight hours.

Of course that would probably wreck havoc on the earth; but, it would be less than that caused by stupid governments.

 

This change will not save any gasoline at all. People are going to drive whether there is daylight or not. It might save some electricity, but thats all.

 

I like DST. I like getting home from work in the fall with an hour or so of daylight left. I HATE it when it gets dark at 3:30 pm in the dead of winter! You can't get anything done during the week. All the outdoor work has to be stacked up through the weekend, when chances are it will be raining anyway.

If the School Districts are concerned about kid's safety, just push the start of the school day back by an hour. That WASNT the original reason for DST though. It was always for energy savings. People tend to use far less energy in the morning than they do in the evening.

 

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No flame intended, but lots of electricity comes from burning oil. I'm sure you knew that.

 

The Congressman wanting to fiddle with the clocks claims that it will save 10,000 barrels/day for the extra 60 days he proposes - 60,000 barrels/year.
The US consumes about 7 BILLION barrels/year.

If Congress weren't beholden to the auto industry money and had kept increasing the CAFE standards (and not providing exemptions for SUV's and light trucks) we would save 1,000,000 barrels/day - for every single day of the year. 365 million vs. 60 thousand.

Also, when's the last time congress actually estimated anything correctly?

 

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Paul, you are sooooo right on!

"Hmmmm, we in Congress haven't got the balls to stand up to GM, so, hey guys, let's change the clocks instead! And whatever happened to that great guy in Alabama who wanted to make Pi equal to 3? We need more bright lights like him to lead us into the future.
Get Jerry Falwell on the phone!!!! If we compress creation into six days, we can eliminate godless science from the curriculum and use all that extra money to give tax breaks to GM because they're having a hard time keeping up with those uppity, arrogant Japanese and their toy electric cars.
You know, foreward thinking like ours only encourages more foreward thinking in the public, although we may have to curb some of the dangerously forward thinking. Our constituents should be excited about living in a world with the stunning moral guidance and environmental leadership of men like George Bush, and corporations like GM and WalMart who work tirelessly to advance the interest of the average folks. Why are people pissed off at us???"

Bob

 

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I would like this very much. I hate the stupid time change.

 

I agree with Wolfman on this one whole heartedly! I HATE the time change. Stop the stupidity and don't change. The insurace industry would love the drop in losses.

 

Well, just to play devil's advocate: I think it's a good idea.

I listened to an article on NPR about it. One of the reasons it has widespread support is that there isn't a lot of downside to it.

We save electricity by putting most peoples "activity hours" during daylight. And apparently the main lobby against it in the past -- the farmers -- care a lot less. More round-the-clock farming is done these days, and it's no longer a dawn-to-dusk operation.

Yes, I absolutely agree that Congress should be stepping up and making some substantive energy plans, instead of covering their collective butts. But this isn't a bad idea in and of itself.

 

Activity hours gets harder and harder to define. This just takes moves an hour of daylight from the beginning of the day to the end. The months they're talking about would mean daylight around 8AM.

A cattle prod should get me up in the morning :wink:

 

IF they have to do it...

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I teach Middle School. Despite studies to the contrary, our district insists on starting school early. Our day starts at 7:30. Students can get breakfast starting at 7 am. If this goes through my students will walk to school in the dark and be eating breakfast on the lunch courts in the dark.

I can only hope that if this happens it will be more leverage to get the district to start school days later in the day. Let's start setting the schedule for the students....rather than the convenience of the buses and cafeteria staff.

 

i find this legislation to very typical of how congress spends our money but in a sense i do feel a bit better about this proposal than i do about the 15,000 pork barrel projects passed at a cost of 25 billion, most of which have no where near the value of this idea

 

The school days are too early as it is. Sleep is extremely important for children due to their rapid growth, and putting them on a schedule too far removed from a daylight cycle wreks havok. How many teenagers do you know exhausted all the time? They're the hardest hit, with longer days and less time than children to sleep.