Daylight Saving Time is coming to the United States this weekend when clocks spring forward one hour at 2 a.m. on Sunday, March 10. But if some thousands of people have their way, this will be the last time.
While many people blame farmers for Daylight Saving Time, the idea actually came about due to the much more blame-worthy military-industrial complex. Daylight Saving Time was enacted in the U.S. in 1918 as a way of conserving energy to support the military and the war effort. It was repealed a year later, then re-established during World War II, and finally standardized in 1966.
According to Marketplace, the premise of Daylight Saving Time totally backfired from the get-go, and people just use more energy later in the day, but the U.S. has been stuck with the whole spring forward, fall back, thing ever since. U.S. Congress officially expanded it by four weeks in 2005.
That said, a few states (Arizona, Hawaii) and most of the U.S. territories–Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and America Samoa–already skip the seasonal clock-flipping. Now a petition is circulating that looks to abolish DST nationwide, and it already has 165,000 people who have signed it and sent messages to their members of Congress to do away with the practice.
They are not alone in their dislike of the seasonal clock change. Currently, there is legislation in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho to do away with the anachronistic practice, and California voters already did away with the clock flip and are waiting for their state reps to finish it off. Florida passed the Sunshine Protection Act last year, but Congress has blocked the move or at least failed to pick it up.
Internationally, the EU is considering scrapping mandatory Daylight Saving Time after a survey of 4.6 million EU citizens showed that 84% were against the current clock-changing practice. They are expected to vote next month. (On the flip side, Japan may switch to a Daylight Saving Time system because they are hosting the summer Olympics in 2020 and want it to stay light later.)
Given our almost universal distaste for Daylight Saving Time, here’s hoping one that of these movements–or all of them–finally succeeds at making time changes a thing of the past.
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