Why we really changed the time early

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.

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.

The President even screws up the time

On August 8, 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This Act changed the time change dates for Daylight Savings Time in the U.S. Beginning this year, DST will begin on the second Sunday in March (this coming weekend) and end the first Sunday in November. (unless you live in Arizona, or Indiana, or Hawaii, who think it's a bunch of hooey.)

The Secretary of Energy is going to conduct a study of the impact of this change to Congress, who can then decide (Ha! Like they can decide anything) to keep the new dates, or go back to the old.

The idea behind this is that we'll save energy by not needing lights on in the evening, the rub comes that it's going to be darker in the morning for an extra 3 weeks, so if you get up early, you have to turn on a light. Duh.

However, the Fire Department still wants you to change the batteries in your smoke detectors and your carbon monoxide detectors. They suggest that every time we change our clocks, we change our batteries.

This time change reeks havoc on automated systems that do the time change themselves. Microsoft warns that for the three weeks this March and April, users of its calendar programs "should view any appointments ... as suspect until they communicate with all meeting invitees." Actually, it's a potential problem in any software that was programmed before the 2005 law was passed. The result is a glitch reminiscent of the Y2K bug, when cataclysmic crashes were feared if computers interpreted the year 2000 as 1900 and couldn't reconcile time appearing to move backward. This is much less threatening, but could cause head-scratching episodes when some computers are an hour off.

Make sure you have the latest updates for Microsoft Windows and for your computer, PDA and smart phone. And if you have a Macintosh make sure you have the Apple updates. I'm told you should also have your security software up to date because the change in your computer could open you up to identity theft and financial losses.

The problem won't show up only in computers, of course. It will affect plenty of non-networked devices that store the time and automatically adjust for daylight saving, like some digital watches and clocks. It could force financial transactions occurring within one hour of midnight to be recorded on the wrong day.

The idea of daylight saving was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin during his sojourn as an American delegate in Paris in 1784, in an essay, "An Economical Project."