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Twice a year, I envy my in-laws in Arizona, and that doesn't count those subzero days when I'm splitting firewood in the snow while they may be basking by a swimming pool. The two regular occasions for envy come at the spring onset and autumnal departure of Daylight Saving Time .
This Sunday night, most Americans -- including those of
us in Colorado -- are supposed to set our clocks forward
one hour. This used to happen on the first Sunday in April,
but in order to save energy,
Congress advanced it in
2007 to the second Sunday in March. The return to Standard
Time was moved from the last Sunday in October to the first
Sunday in November.
In theory, this saves energy because with an extra hour of daylight in the evening, people will wait longer to turn on their lights -- or something like that.
But that theory doesn't stand up to some facts gathered from Indiana, where 15 counties used to go on Daylight Time while the other 77 counties stayed on Standard Time. In 2006, the state legislature put all of Indiana on Daylight Time.
Since electricity consumption can be measured easily, this provided an ideal way to answer the question: Did the counties that had been on Standard Time use less energy after they switched to Daylight Time?
A professor and a graduate student at the University of California in Santa Barbara analyzed more than 7 million monthly meter readings. Residential electric usage increased from 1% to 4%, costing Hoosiers an extra $8.6 million a year, and social costs from increased emissions were estimated at from $1.6 to $5.6 million, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.
Why the increase? When people come home earlier in the day on hot days, they turn up the air conditioning, which more than compensates for any savings in lighting costs.
But it's the personal energy that annoys me. It seems that there are always more timepieces to adjust. One of my grandfathers got by with just a pocket watch, and the other grandparents had one clock in the kitchen and an alarm clock. Clocks and watches used to be expensive mechanical contrivances; now they're cheap electronic devices.
Thus we have battery-powered quartz clocks in every room. Plus our watches. Plus the microwave oven and the gas range in the kitchen. Plus alarm clocks in the bedroom. Plus clocks in the cars. Plus telephone answering machines. Plus our computers, some of which run an old operating system that automatically adjusts the system time, but in April and October, not the new March and November.
With all that, I'm busy for a couple of hours two mornings a year, teetering on ladders and trying to find the manuals for answering machines and kitchen stoves, and I always forget something, which explains why, the last time we needed a coffee-maker, we shopped until we found one that did not have a built-in digital clock -- one more thing to forget to reset.
And that's when I envy those Arizona relatives. Arizona is the only state in the Mountain Time Zone that sensibly stays on Standard Time all year, thereby eliminating the semi-annual clock-resetting drill . The federal law that establishes Daylight Time allows states to exempt themselves, and A rizona has done so for the past 40 years link.
But the Arizona policy was probably motivated more by commercial interests than by a desire to simplify life for its citizens. When California shifts to Daylight Time, its clocks are the same as Arizona's on Standard Time, and the two states do a lot of business. And further, not all of Arizona stays on Standard Time; the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona observes Daylight Time.
So the clocks aren't consistent throughout the Grand Canyon State, and doubtless some confusion results. Even so, I will be jealous on this Sunday morning, and again on Nov. 2 when I have to go through the same clockwork drill in reverse.
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