Senate unanimously approves year round Daylight Saving Time

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Where are they going leave it at? Spring

Legislation to make daylight saving time permanent passed the Senate last week, but the House is not ready to be a rubber stamp, spelling potential trouble ahead for its passage in the lower chamber.

Leaders on both sides of the aisle have made clear they are not in a rush to act on the legislation, with some citing the focus on the crisis unfolding in Ukraine, as well as the need for further review from members before taking up the proposal.

And though the idea has enjoyed bipartisan support across Congress, its path in the lower chamber is uncertain, as a few members have begun to call for more research into the proposed measure before signing on to the push.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) told The Hill on Friday that, while she has supported doing away with the semiannual time change in the past, she’s gotten mixed reactions from her constituents over the idea.

“I've been hearing a lot about this from my constituents recently because we're in Seattle and it is so dark,” she said, “and so if we make daylight saving permanent, it's gonna be dark until like nine o'clock in the morning.”

Pressed about his stance on the proposal, Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) stressed the need for additional evidence before taking a position.

“I'm going to ask my staff for some empirical studies about this,” he said.

In remarks to The Hill on Friday, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), head of the House Democratic Caucus, said he assumes the legislation will “be more broadly discussed both by the relevant committees and within the caucus sooner rather than later.”

“Different members have articulated a different perspective. We'll have to come to some consensus. We were unexpectedly sent this bill by the Senate. Now, we’re trying to absorb it,” Jeffries said.

But Rep. John Yarmouth (D-Ky.) on Friday afternoon cast doubt on any chance the House would immediately pass the measure, telling The Hill he “can’t imagine” the bill being fast-tracked the same way in the lower chamber that it recently had in the Senate.

“I don't know that many members have really thought through it,” Yarmouth said, adding most members were kind of “blindsided” by how quickly the Senate approved the proposal. But he anticipates much more opinion on the matter in the near future as public interest around the push has grown.

“Now what will happen is you'll get all of this outpouring of studies and people say, ‘Yeah, we agree you shouldn't change twice a year, but what is it, standard time or daylight time?’ And then you get the farm bureaus and the parents associations,” he said, while predicting the “longer it goes, the chances of passage decline.”

“It'll get more controversial the longer it goes,” Yarmouth said. He also recalled his past experience as a congressional staffer in the early 1970s, when he said the time change emerged as an “emotional issue.”

David Prerau, the author of “Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time,” told The Hill that while the idea had been popular when it was proposed, much of the public grew to dislike it during winter.

“All of a sudden, everybody realized that they didn't like it at all. It made the mornings very, very dark. All of the sunrises were an hour later than it would have been,” Prerau said. “Many, many people were getting up into pitch dark, going to work in the pitch dark, which they disliked. And they also disliked sending their kids to school in the dark, having to walk on dark country roads ... so it became very unpopular very quickly.”

I don't want DST at all. Why can't they just get rid of it instead of making it permanent?

If this bill passes, it will be quite dark in NYC until about 8 AM in mid-December through to mid-January.

On Sunday, clocks across the UK will go forward by an hour – except mine. Since October 2018, I have been living my life entirely by GMT. It may sound extreme (and inconvenient) but I do it because I believe that daylight savings time (DST) is an unnecessary bane on our society; a failed experiment long in need of terminating.

For a start, changing the clocks is bad for our health. This is because we humans (and many other lifeforms on this planet) are synchronised with Earth’s natural orbit – we naturally wake up when the day begins and sleep when night falls. Changing our “social clock” creates a gulf between the time on our watches and the height of the sun in the sky. (This was made even worse during the second world war, when British double summer time was introduced, time-shifting the natural day by two hours instead of one.) In 2019, a group of experts in psychology, neurology and sleep cycles concluded that “if we want to improve human health … we should abandon DST”, after studies showed that, in the weeks after a clock change, sleep durations fall and heart attacks increase. There is a strong safety case, too: when DST was paused as an experiment in the 1960s, road traffic accidents in England and Wales fell by 11%.

Personally, I have struggled with maintaining consistent sleeping patterns for most of my life, and my learning disability (Asperger syndrome) and sensitivity to change makes the transition even more difficult. Keeping my clocks on GMT since 2018 has improved my sleep and has made me a slightly less nervous person, as I now know that the day is progressing as it should instead of being artificially rewound or fast-forwarded. When I have to keep an appointment between April and October, basic arithmetic is enough to translate it into my time zone.

I founded the anti daylight saving time movement Hora Solaris (“solar time” in Latin), because I am convinced that DST can no longer be allowed to exist and must be abolished in not just the UK, but every country implementing it.

The European parliament voted to scrap the hour change in 2019 (and a poll showed that a majority of EU citizens agreed) but the bill was then mired in bureaucracy and hasn’t been implemented.

In the UK, my anti-DST activism has been met with both support and derision. Some see my efforts as a form of subtle heroism, and follow my example of “freezing” their clocks in one of the two time zones; while others consider them a thorn in society’s side.

daylight savings time as it started in march.