Senate moves to abolish Standard Time & stay in Daylight Savings Time permanently

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https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vkw5/s...of-the-sun

INTRO: The U.S. Senate just voted to eliminate the biannual practice of springing forward and falling back with the passage of the Sunshine Protection Act.

Sponsored by a bipartisan group of senators that includes Ed Markey (D - MA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), the bill moves to keep the U.S. in Daylight Savings Time—the time zone that we’re currently in after losing an hour of sleep on Sunday morning.

Should the bill pass in the House of Representatives, the entire country would abolish Standard Time—the period between November and March—and thus the need to move our clocks back an hour every fall. Daylight savings would become permanent starting in November 2023—though the legislation affords states and localities the individual power to reinstate clock-changing locally.

It would mean the end of dark November afternoons, which bill proponents say only come with negative public health and energy consumption outcomes.

“The biannual transition of ‘spring forward’ and ‘fall back’ disrupts circadian sleeping patterns, causing confusion, sleep disturbances and even an elevated risk to heart health,” Markey and Rubio wrote in an op-ed for CNN over the weekend. “Year-round daylight saving time could also decrease the likelihood of fatal car accidents, which jump six percent in the days following the time change.” (MORE - details)

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What happened the last time the U.S. tried to make daylight saving time permanent?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...180979742/

INTRO: For 16 months in the mid-1970s, America’s clocks sprang forward and never fell back. Year-round daylight saving time (DST), signed into law by President Richard Nixon in January 1974, sought to maximize evening sunlight and, in doing so, help mitigate an ongoing national gas crisis.

But while the experiment initially proved popular, with 79 percent of Americans expressing support for the change in December 1973, approval quickly plummeted, dropping to 42 percent by February 1974, reported the New York Times’ Anthony Ripley in October of that year.

The main drawback to pushing the clock forward permanently was the prolonged early-morning darkness in the winter, which left children heading to school when it was “jet black” outside, as a parent told the Washington Post’s Barbara Bright-Sagnier at the time. Writing for Washingtonian, Andrew Beaujon notes that eight students in Florida died in traffic accidents in the weeks following the change; in the nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs, similar incidents led some schools to delay classes until the sun came up.

In October 1975, President Gerald Ford signed legislation reversing permanent daylight saving time. Though approval of the initiative had increased during the long summer days, the prospect of another long, dark-and potentially deadly-winter led lawmakers to end the planned two-year experiment early. As a Senate committee report stated, the “majority of the public” had expressed “distaste” for DST in the wintertime. Compounding the seeming failure of the experiment was the fact that the change, according to the Department of Transportation, saved little energy and may have actually caused an uptick in gasoline consumption... (MORE - details)