Excerpts from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/opinion/09downing.html
After nearly 100 years, daylight saving has yet to save us anything.
The idea of falsifying clocks was proposed by the British architect
William Willett in 1907, but the Germans were the first to try it in
1916, hoping that it would help them conserve fuel during the First
World War. Then Britain and America gave their clocks a whirl. The
fuel savings never materialized, and daylight saving was so unpopular
here that Congress repealed it before officially declaring an end to
the war.
That most Americans still believe we save daylight to help farmers
tells you something about the quality of debate on this perennial
controversy. In fact, farmers hated daylight saving. They needed
morning light to get their dairy and crops to markets, and they were
powerful enough to rally popular opinion against the law. For that
reason, except during the Second World War, Congress did not dare to
pass a national daylight saving policy for almost 50 years.
It was New York City that kept the practice alive, and it did so by
passing a local daylight ordinance in 1919. This served the powerful
department stores, which wanted evening light to tempt working people
to shop on their way home. Wall Street profited too - fast time
preserved one hour of overlap with London traders, whose clocks sprung
forward every year.
By 1965, 71 of the largest American cities practiced daylight saving
and 59 did not. One airline reported 4,000 calls a day from customers
asking what time it would be in their destination cities. The US Naval
Observatory dubbed the nation "the world's worst timekeeper."
And so in 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, which gave us
six months of Standard Time and six months of daylight saving. This
wise compromise has since been compromised out of existence. We now
face eight months of daylight saving. Before we bargain our way into a
permanent, year-round policy, we should know whom we have to thank for
saving us nothing.
Richard Nixon infamously mandated year-round daylight saving in 1974
and 1975. This decision did not soften the blow of the OPEC oil
embargo, but it did put school children on pitch-black streets every
morning until the plan was scaled back.
A Department of Transportation study concluded that Nixon's experiment
yielded no definitive fuel saving. It optimistically speculated,
however, that daylight saving might one day help us conserve as many
as 100,000 barrels of oil a day. Based on that projection and the hope
of reducing street crime, in 1986 and again this year Congress
extended daylight saving by a month. But there has been no
corresponding reduction in oil consumption or crime.
The new four-week daylight saving extension won't save fuel or lives,
but it will put our clocks seriously out of sync with Europe's,
costing airlines $150 million a year. It will foul up clocks in
computers and confuse trade with our continental neighbors.
Sure, later sunsets will encourage Americans to go outside, but this
will only put more cars on the road for more hours of the day. The
petroleum industry recognized daylight saving's potential to increase
gasoline consumption as early as 1920. And it is a sweet deal for
retailers: candy makers have long lobbied to extend daylight saving
past Halloween.
In 1986, the golf industry told Congress the extension would boost
fees and retail sales by as much as $400 million annually. The
barbecue industry saw a $150 million bonanza. And 7-Eleven convenience
stores stocked up for a $50 million rise in sales.
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