Daylight Savings Time

I've taken a shot at Daylight Savings Time before. One of the ways DST is sold is with some old analysis that it saved energy. I always found that odd because as my earlier post said, there is no extra hour of sunlight. It's just moved from the morning to the evening.

And now, I find that perhaps my skepticism was warranted as described in this Wall Street Journal article, a new study shows that Indiana counties that adopted DST over the last few years actually saw their energy usage go up, no down as we are told should occur.

There's nothing inherently wrong with moving the clock. In the modern world, we don't work in fields and our morning start times are set by the office clock rather than the farmer's crow of a rooster. So, if in the modern world we'd rather have our three or four hours of post-work sunlight extended rather than having that hour added to the hour or so we have in the morning, that's entirely rational. Just don't tell me that we actually get an extra hour of light and I'm not convinced that that we save a bunch of money by doing so.