Daylight Savings Time

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Daylight Savings Time Winston Churchill once said ‘“An extra yawn one morning in the springtime, an extra snooze one night in the autumn… We borrow an hour one night in April; we pay it back with golden interest five months later’” (qtd. in Minnicks). This is the epitome of what is wrong with daylight savings time. Adding an hour of daylight in the evening during the spring lets us get outside more often and enjoy the outdoors. During the fall, however, we put that hour of sunlight back in the morning, gaining an hour of sunlight at a time when most people are still fast asleep. This makes absolutely zero sense and only serves to make people more tired and discombobulated than they already were. Daylight savings has always been a contentious topic, and Congress has changed it multiple times over its convoluted history, even going so far as to move it three weeks ahead in 2007 to give kids a safer Halloween (Stein). In fact, some states like Hawaii and Arizona don’t even recognize daylight savings time anymore (Breus). They have excellent reasons for doing so. Daylight saving time began in the United States during World War I, primarily to save fuel by reducing the need to use artificial lighting. Although some states and communities observed daylight saving time between the wars, it was not observed nationally again until World War II. During that time, it was again used to increase electricity savings (Danzig). On the outside, this might look like a smart idea; more daylight means less use of lights. However, if one delves a little deeper, quite a few problems arise. Environmental economist Hendrik Wolff, of the University of Washington, co-authored a paper that studied Australian power usage data when parts of the country extended daylight saving time for the 2000 Sydney Olympics and other parts did not. The researchers found that the practice reduced

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