Sunday we participate in that biannual folly: Daylight Savings Time.
First conceived by Benjamin Franklin as a conservation measure (think of all the candle wax we’ll save!), it’s become little more than an annoyance – chances on at least one of your electronic devices is wrong today.
We’ve already inched away from DST, as the government decided two years ago that we should “spring ahead” three weeks earlier than before, and “fall back” one week later.
But except for that extra hour of sleep, why fall back at all? Proponents say we save energy, but the numbers don’t add up.
Matthew Kotchen, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleague Laura Grant studied the effect of DST in Indiana, where time shifts were first implemented statewide in 2006. Kotchen and Grant compared energy usage that year with previous, non-DST years and found that electricity consumption increased by 2% to 4% during the fall back.
Their study estimated that the increased usage cost Indiana $9 million a year, and – in a conclusion that will shock some green gurus – increased pollution emissions.
“Finally,” Kotchen and Grant wrote, “we argue that the effect is likely to be even stronger in other regions of the United States.” So enjoy your spring forward, revel in that extra hour of sunlight tomorrow, but hope that by the time autumn rolls around, we don’t have to fall back again.