Does it really save energy? Today where I live, the sun is coming up at 6:24 AM and setting at 5:50 PM. The whole workday is covered in sunshine now. If DST had gone into effect, the sun would come up at 7:24 AM and go down at 6:50 PM. Where's the big savings? People will be using electricity and such either at work, getting to or from work, or at home either way. Is it really a big advantage?
Sam Segal at Stanford found that overall, any energy savings from screwing around with the clocks was minimal and dwindling, that "future trends will make energy savings from DST less likely." He admits that later sunsets may mean less crime and fewer car accidents, but then there's no reason then not to switch to DST all the time and just make it ST. It just seems like a lot of trouble and disrupted circadian rhythms for nothing.
Blame Ben.
In William Cabell Bruce's book Benjamin Franklin: Self-Revealed, A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on His Own Writings (G.P. Putnam, 1917), we have this passage:
Franklin enters upon a series of elaborate calculations to demonstrate that, between the 20th of March and 20th of September, the Parisians, because of their habit of preferring candlelight in the evening to sunlight in the morning, had consumed sixty-four millions and fifty thousand pounds of candles, which, at an average price of thirty sols per pound, made ninety-six millions and seventy-five thousand livres tournois. An immense sum! that the City of Paris might save every year by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles; to say nothing of the period of the year during which the days are shorter. This computation is succeeded by a number of suggestions as to the different means by which such of the Parisians as did not amend their hours upon learning from this paper that it is daylight when the sun rises could be induced to reform their habits.
It seems that Mr. Franklin's basis for proposing daylight savings time comes from the fact that Frenchmen are slugabeds who stay up too late carousing. This would be like setting some sort of national policy based on the behavior of people who can't stop binge-watching shows even though they have work in the morning.
I will grant you that 64,050,000 pounds of candles is nothing to sneeze at. That's a lot of wax. And 96,075,000 livres tournois is a goodly sum, something like $1,067,914,981 or a cool billion in modern dollars if you go by the currency converter at Historical Statistics (which requires a few assumptions, but let's say it's close enough).
On the other hand, electricity and natural gas with an extant infrastructure are not candles; the delivery of the latter is much easier and far cheaper. I daresay that if Franklin did his calculations based on modern technology for a city with the same number of residents as the Paris of his visit, he'd come away with much lower savings -- and that would maintain even if he threw in the price of firewood to warm all those Parisian carousers.
I'd never spurn old Ben, a truly unique man and definitely a genius, but I believe that even if his analysis was correct for the 18th century, it has led to a solution in need of a problem in the 21st. More trouble than it's worth is the phrase that comes to mind. I know of few things that cause as much universal peevishness in America as daylight savings time, and it should be abolished.
You may say "What about Franklin's statement on death and taxes? Don't they cause more peeves?" Well, we can't stop death, only slow it down, and taxes inspire hatred, not irritation. If anyone has an idea on how to get rid of taxes short of complete anarchy, I'm listening.
1 comment:
DST already?
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