The Sunshine Protection Act: Daylight No Longer Needs Saving

Getting out of bed in the morning, for most, is already a tremendously arduous undertaking. Add in the annual March tradition of advancing clocks forward by one hour, and there really isn’t a worse way to start off one’s day. Introducing daylight saving, where “springing forward” sets clocks one hour forward in the spring, and “falling back” pushes the clock back one hour: taken as a whole, a rather arbitrary practice that is likely to meet its demise with upcoming legislation.

Third Time’s the Charm

With a resounding unanimous vote, the United States Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday, March 15, 2022. This act establishes a permanent daylight saving time (DST) within the country and is scheduled to go into effect in November of 2023. Paralleling a supportive public and scientific sentiment, the legislation is actually the third attempt to end the practice of setting clocks forward during the summer months, but the two prior Sunshine Protection Act of 2018 and 2019, had died in the proposal committee.

The current status of the bill is favorable for passage, but still requires House approval and President Joe Biden’s signature to become law. If the outcome is positive, this will set the permanent time in the United States to permanently follow April 2023’s “spring forward” standard, meaning that evenings will experience longer stretches of daylight from thereon out.

In a speech supporting the bill’s passage, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) expresses great distaste for the time change. “We don’t have to keep doing this stupidity anymore,” he says, referring to the biyearly clock reset. “And pardon the pun, but this is an idea whose time has come.”

Resource Saving Turned Daylight Saving

In modern times, daylight saving is most often characterized by groans of pained disappointment from those lamenting the inevitable one-hour loss of sleep. On the historical timeline, Canadians were the first to turn their clocks forward by one hour, yet the German and Austro-Hungarian empires were the first states to have enacted DST with legislation. These two allies did so in 1916 during World War I to conserve fuel by lessening the use of artificial lighting. Powers on either side of the global conflict, including Great Britain and France, soon followed suit, but most fell back into the standard time until the onset of the second World War.

DST was initially introduced to the United States in 1917 by Pittsburgh councilman Robert Garland, who garnered congressional support for a DST plan after stumbling across its use during his travels to the British Empire. Dubbed “Fast Time,” DST was signed into law a year later by President Wilson during WWI, but the policy was quickly forgoed at the war’s end. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rebranding of DST as “War Time” federally reinstated the time change during WWII, motives for enactment were similar to those of Germany and Austria-Hungary’s decades prior: conserving fuel, electricity, and other essential resources for the war effort.

In September of 1945, mere weeks after the Allied victory, “War Time” fell into local jurisdiction—allowing individual states to choose their time schedule—rather than being replaced with new legislation that would enforce a national standard. Predictably, chaos ensued, with civilians unable to coordinate work hours and rendezvous times, and railroads unable to keep up with the countless time zones their trains passed through.

Congressional efforts to put order into the disarray ultimately led to the Uniform Time Act of 1966, a law outlining a time schedule where clocks are reset every last Sunday of April at 2:00 a.m. local time and again on the last Sunday of October. In 2007, the change was shifted to the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday in November. Hawaii and Arizona decided against observing provisions of this act, but for the rest of the nation, thus began the bleary tradition of needing to reprogram one’s Circadian rhythm—one’s internal clock—twice a year.

Science Supports Sunshine

Alongside personal grievances rooted in the biyearly time change, science also proves itself a major opponent of DST advocates (which are already few and far between) and reveals consequences surpassing just the inconvenience of needing to reset clocks.

According to The American Economic Review, “even relatively minor sleep imbalances have been shown to cause errors in judgment, anxiety, impatience, less efficient processing of information, and loss of attention.” Their study revealed that in the US alone, around $31 billion is lost in a single day on NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ market exchanges as a result of springing forward. Simply put, people’s minds just don’t function as well after a change in their sleep schedule, which leads to unusually high financial losses in places such as the stock market. These consequences transfer to other daily activities as well, such as increasing the chance for vehicle crashes, which for fatal accidents, saw a 6% surge according to a 2020 study at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

As for the human body, springing forward often results in less morning light exposure, and following suit, decreased levels of cortisol. While cortisol, being the hormone that elevates stress, has somewhat of a bad rap, keeping up cortisol levels prevents weakness, fatigue, and instances of abnormally low blood pressure. More daylight at night then decreases levels of melatonin, a bodily hormone that causes drowsiness. When compounding these two endocrine effects, the amount and quality of sleep (especially in adolescents) plummets. Prolongment of these effects can then cause health problems all across the board, from increasing rates of obesity and diabetes to raising the risk of developing various types of cancer.

Still, others point out the positives of DST to justify the continuation of a nearly 60-year national tradition. For example, journalist Nathan Seppa for Science News, backed by research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, explains how the extended daylight ties into more exercise and physical activity in young children. Especially with the continuing rise of the Digital Age and a growing inclination for staying locked up at home on an electronic device, parents and even kids themselves could very well use the extra hour of light DST grants for more physically active activities out in the fresh air.

So, really, it's up to you as an individual to decide on what stance you take: pro-DST, anti-DST, or somewhere in between. Either way, with the bill being drafted by both Democratic and Republican senators—quite a feat given the extreme polarization of the United States’ current political climate, this bipartisan support reveals the undeniably universal desire for creating a permanent time standard for the nation.

As of 2022, less than half of the world’s countries still practice DST, with a great number of nations (most being in the tropics given the relatively constant day lengths around the equator) having never adopted the change at all. For the time being, it looks like the United States is well on its way to joining the global majority, at least when it comes to daylight saving.