Should we abolish daylight saving?
April 4th 2010 20:28
VYOOS EDITORIAL
The debate about daylight saving seems to reappear every six months. Go figure.
In the past week or two, as northern hemisphere citizens go through the annual vexation of losing an hour's sleep, and southern hemisphere citizens enjoy the annual luxury of an extra hour's slumber, an American scientist has called for the abolition of daylight saving because, he claims, it does not achieve what it is supposed to achieve.
Dr Hendrick Wolff headed a team of University of California scientists which studied the effect of daylight saving on energy consumption.
They took advantage of an unusual situation in Indiana where, until 2006, only 15 of its 92 counties swapped to daylight saving. If you wanted to know the time in Indiana, you needed GPS.
From 2006, however, State authorities decided to present a unified clock, all 92 counties switching to daylight saving. This created an opportunity, by comparing energy consumption patterns before and after, to see if daylight saving saved energy.
It didn't. In fact, the study showed power use increased in the counties adopting summer time for the first time in 2006, adding about US$8 million to household electricity bills.
"Daylight saving does not save energy,'' Dr Wolff said. "If society wants to keep daylight saving time we need to have better arguments, as the old energy story doesn't work anymore.''
The old energy story? Dr Wolff's assumption that daylight saving is an energy issue is arguable. It's a lifestyle issue. It's about having an extra hour of daylight in summer to play with the kids in the backyard. Or do some gardening. Or drink beer. It's about the community's deep sense of satisfaction, once a year, when we get an extra hour in bed.
An Australian scientist, Professor Michael Polonsky, of Deakin University, was also perplexed by the Wolff study, suggesting energy conservation was never the aim. It was important to remember, Polonsky said, that air-conditioners were not in widespread use when daylight saving became popular in the 1970s.
It was a social initiative, Prof Polonksy says, and from that perspective, daylight saving had too many benefits to abolish it. "The social phenomenon has been valuable and I think, to get rid of it, would be a hard change,'' he said.
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