From the WSJ Opinion Archives
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Clockwork Blues
Congress can save everyone time by giving up on extending daylight savings.
When Judy Collins recorded "Who Knows Where the Time Goes," she was singing about the deep mysteries of life. The question of where the time goes when we set our clocks forward or back every April and October is not so existential, but it can be confounding. So it's probably good that Congress has been facing tough questions over its plan to extend daylight-saving time through March and November and yesterday scaled it back a bit. We need time to think.
The goal of an extension, part of a larger energy bill, is conservation. Picture it as a gentle form of rationing: If the sun sets later than usual during darkish months of the year, people may not need to turn on their lights quite so soon. Claims of a 1% energy saving per month are based on a Transportation Department report done after the 1973 oil embargo, when the most of the nation went on daylight-saving time for much of 1974 and 1975.
Like many things that sound too good to be true, however, the promise of painless conservation through simple clock changing has holes. An extension won't be painless. For instance, the airline industry notes that it will throw American schedules out of whack with Europe's. Utility and telecommunications companies have been fretting about the chaos and cost if computerized meters and clockworks have to be recalibrated. And all, critics ask, because of a 30-year-old DOT energy-use study, packed with guesstimates?
One group that should be rooting for an extension is the candymakers, who have always been sorry that standard time resumes just before Halloween. If it didn't, the kiddies would have an extra hour of relatively safe daylight in which to trick-or-treat. More of them might be allowed out in the first place as well, demanding more candy.
Yet children have also been the subject of a leading concern about an extension. When the sun sets later, by the clock at least, it also rises later. So in November kids would wait for morning school buses in pitch darkness. Less ominously, adults might miss their favorite morning-drive-time radio show. Many stations that use the same or similar frequencies can broadcast only during daylight hours, when atmospherics reduce the risk of signal interference.
Farmers often complain about any and all time shifts, in part, it is said, because their animals don't adjust easily to the changes. Perhaps, but as a Hoosier we know points out, most chickens are raised inside factories anyway, and "cows usually come when you call them, if they think they are going to get fed."
Actually, it's human animals who might have the most difficult time adjusting if the sun began rising at 8:40 a.m.--as it could, say, in Detroit. Besides, many people enjoy the coziness of those long, lamp-lit winter nights. Imagine if Robert Frost had had to set his poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" in broad daylight. Nothing "lovely, dark and deep" about that.
A congressional compromise reached yesterday would extend daylight-saving into only a part of March and early November (for a total of four weeks instead of two full months) and give industry a year to prepare for the change. In these times of turmoil, though, the instinct that favors clinging to the current, customary ways of marking time is an understandable one.
