Also on today’s menu:
Global Oil Market Is Complex
The sun rose at 8:27 AM on January 7, 1974. Children in the Washington area had left for school in the dark that morning, thanks to a new national experiment during a wrenching energy crisis: most of the US went to year-round daylight saving time beginning on January 6. “It was jet black” outside when her daughter was supposed to leave for school, Florence Bauer of Springfield told the Washington Post. “Some of the children took flashlights with them.”
The change would benefit Americans in the long run, predicted Steve Grossman of the Department of Transportation. Yes, accidents in the morning darkness may become more common, he said, but longer daylight hours could mean eliminating the hazards of evening commutes: “stress, anxiety, and many drivers have had a couple of drinks,” as he told the Post. Outside the capital, others vowed defiance: Robert Yost, the mayor of St. Francis, Kansas said his town’s council “felt it was time to put our foot down and stop this monkey business.”
The excerpt above comes from the Washingtonian which provided a look-back at the U.S. government’s most recent experiment into extending Daylight Savings Time year-round. “People Hated It” the headline reminds us.
The article was posted in the wake of U.S Senate’s passage of the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday, which would make Daylight Savings Time permanent starting in 2023. Some critics of the legislation, including sleep experts, think we should make Standard Time permanent instead, shifting daylight hours earlier in the day rather than later.
Café Chatter shows that the issue is important to people:
Should we continue to “spring ahead” and “fall back”, or just keep Standard Time? My friends and I have been discussing this for a few days now. An interesting article was written in the Concord Monitor recently, headlined “Sleep docs say Standard Time Best.” The long and short of it says that experts say humans are “diurnal” (they function better in daylight) and that delaying daylight due to clock setting (forward/backward) can have adverse effects on the quality of daily human functioning. They further say that the desire to add light later in the day is an attempt to extend summer days. And who doesn’t want longer summer days, right?
— Karey Caldwell
Try as I might, I have been unable to find the article I previously wrote about Daylight Savings Time. I do know that Benjamin Franklin is credited with the idea of waking earlier to take advantage of the sunlight. Franklin was serving as a minister to France in 1784 when he sent a letter to the Journal of Paris, humorously describing how he was awakened by a loud noise one April morning, several hours earlier than his normal noon rising, and was astonished to see his room full of light, yet with no candles or lamps burning. He suggested that all Parisians should rise seven hours earlier in the morning, and thus go to bed earlier in the evening, to decrease the hours of darkness that people were awake and would need to use candles. Franklin estimated the change would save Paris residents 64,050,000 pounds of tallow and wax for half a year.
Germany adopted Daylight Saving Time during World War I, followed by Britain in 1916. In 1918, the U.S. Congress put this country on Daylight Saving Time for the duration of the war in order to save precious fuel. When Congress repealed the national law after the war ended, some local areas observed Daylight Saving Time on their own schedules. Then came World War II, and Congress re-instituted year-round Daylight Saving Time — until Sept. 30, 1945.
The Uniform Time Act of 1966 established standard dates for Daylight Saving Time: the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. Observation of the time change was not mandated, and states such as Hawaii stayed with Standard Time. Congress, in an amendment in 1986, moved the beginning date forward to the first Sunday in April, and as of March 2007, Daylight Saving Time begins on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday of November.
There is a great deal of evidence that switching between Standard and Daylight Savings Time is bad for people’s health, which leads to the debate over which option to make permanent.
For me, Daylight Savings Time never made sense. Remaining on Standard Time does not mean that individuals or businesses cannot change their waking hours or business hours. Many businesses already observe summer hours and winter hours. If golf courses — one of the main lobbyists for permanent Daylight Savings Time — want people to play earlier or later, all they have to do is announce the hours they wish to be open. It should not force everyone to disrupt their sleep schedules.
Back to that 1970s experiment: While 79 percent of Americans approved of the change in December 1973, approval had dropped to 42 percent three months later, the New York Times reported. After President Richard Nixon resigned, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas successfully introduced an amendment to end the DST experiment. Energy savings, a House panel noted, “must be balanced against a majority of the public’s distaste for the observance of Daylight Saving Time.”
Global Oil Market Is Complex
The Atlantic ran an article explaining some of the complexities of the global oil market. In the late 2000s, when oil and gas companies expected that the United States would need to import more oil and gas, it expected to have to process more cheap, dirty crudes, and firms began preparing their refineries for decades of heavy, sludgy imports like those produced by Russia.
With Russian-oil imports now banned, those refiners face the prospect of a less optimal mix of crude imports than they might like, which is why Venezuelan and Iranian oil, which also is a “dirty crude” similar to Russia’s, is suddenly being sought.
Meanwhile, companies have been cautious about ramping up drilling. They are feeling pressure from investors who prefer dividends and share buybacks to ambitious and expensive drilling plans, and a push from investors and others to reduce carbon emissions has curbed their appetite for drilling.
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