Did all your Daylight Savings Time changes work, or were you late for church? Here in the LipsYard household, 15 clocks (including 2 cars) had to be changed manually, 2 clocks have DST buttons on them, and our computer running Windows XP made the jump thanks to a patch sent out by Microsoft last week.
Congress and the Bush administration would have us believe the early change now, and the late switch back in November, will save the country lots of energy. Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time believes the extension of daylight-savings time is designed to help manufacturers and retailers.
Over the years, Congress has repeatedly studied the effects of Daylight Savings Time, and every time it turns out we haven’t saved anything. The best study is from the Nixon era when he went on a desperate attempt of year round Daylight Savings as a result of the Opec oil embargo and he came up with no savings at all.
Downing says that Daylight Savings pushes Americans out of the house at the end of the day. We go to the ballpark, or the mall, but we don’t walk there, we get in our cars and drive. The oil industry has known since 1930 that Daylight Savings increases gasoline consumption.
When Americans go out of the house they spend money. Daylight Savings may not be an effective energy policy, but it is a tremendously effective spending policy. The first and most persistent lobby for Daylight Savings is the chamber of commerce. In the 1986 Congressional hearings (which gave us an extra month back then,) the Golf industry reported that one additional month of Daylight Savings was worth $200 million in additional sales of equipment and greens fees. The BBQ industry earned $100 million in additional sales of grills and briquettes.
Downing says that Daylight Savings pushes Americans out of the house at the end of the day. We go to the ballpark, or the mall, but we don’t walk there, we get in our cars and drive. The oil industry has known since 1930 that Daylight Savings increases gasoline consumption.
When Americans go out of the house they spend money. Daylight Savings may not be an effective energy policy, but it is a tremendously effective spending policy. The first and most persistent lobby for Daylight Savings is the chamber of commerce. In the 1986 Congressional hearings (which gave us an extra month back then,) the Golf industry reported that one additional month of Daylight Savings was worth $200 million in additional sales of equipment and greens fees. The BBQ industry earned $100 million in additional sales of grills and briquettes.
Another big industry that gets a push is candy manufacturers. This year, for the first time, Halloween will have an extra hour of daylight, and they figure that small kids will stay out longer, thus collecting more candy, which we have to buy.Congress has set aside $150 million to study the effects of this latest change, and I’m sure they’ll find out (again!) that Daylight Savings Time is good for business, not so much for energy savings.
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