As most people no doubt noticed given that they were robbed of an hour of sleep, Sunday marked the beginning of Daylight Savings Time in the United States, Canada, and several other countries in North America. For morning people, Daylight Savings is depriving them of an hour of silent morning light.
Like millions of other Americans who have went through cold winter, I'm looking forward to the change of season. But Daylight Savings Time is an annual tradition whose time has passed. Now it's not only unnecessary: It's also wasteful. And it's time to say goodbye to it.
Daylight Savings has been an official decision since 1918, when President Woodrow Wilson made it into law during World War One. Nowadays, its purpose is to save energy: One more hour of sunlight in the evening means one less hour of consumption of lighting. In 2005, President George W. Bush lengthened Daylight Savings Time by a month as part of a sweeping energy bill signed that year, supporting the need to reduce U.S. dependency on foreign oil.
But does Daylight Savings Time actually make much of a difference? Evidence suggests that the answer is no. After the Australian government extended Daylight Savings Time by two months in 2000 in order to accommodate the Sydney Olympic Games, a study showed that the move failed to reduce electricity demand at all. More recently, a study of homes in Indiana—a state that adopted Daylight Savings Time only in 2006—showed that the savings from electricity use were negated by additional use of air conditioning and heat.
The simple act of adjusting to the time change. Many people feel the effects of the "spring forward" for longer than a day; a study showed that Americans lose around 40 minutes of sleep on the Sunday night after the shift. This means more than just additional yawns on Monday: the resulting loss in productivity costs the economy an estimated $434 million a year.
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