Policy
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Day 22: "Permanent Standard Time vs Permanent DST"
Yesterday’s post we saw most people want DST abolished, that the data is one-sided, and yet we’re still doing it. The reason, the whole reason, is the question I want to spend today on.
If you abolish the biannual switch, which time do you keep?
This sounds like a small technical question. It is the only question that has actually mattered for the last twenty years of DST politics.
The two camps
The permanent-standard-time camp:
- The American Academy of Sleep Medicine
- The European Sleep Research Society
- Most chronobiologists and circadian researchers
- Pediatric and education groups
- The AMA
Their argument is essentially the one we ended Day 21 on. Standard time keeps “noon” reasonably close to actual solar noon, which means morning light arrives at a clock time that aligns with most people’s wake-up. Morning light is, as it turns out, the single most powerful entrainment cue for the human circadian system. Permanent DST means in northern latitudes you’re waking up before sunrise for four months a year, every year, forever. That has documented health costs.
The permanent-DST camp:
- The US Senate (via the Sunshine Protection Act, 2022)
- Retail, restaurants, golf, evening sports
- Tourism and outdoor recreation lobbies
- About twenty state legislatures
Their argument is economic. Lighter evenings mean more activity after work. People go shopping, eat at restaurants, play sports, walk their dogs. There’s some evidence of reduced evening crime. Children get more daylight to play after school. The argument probably isn’t crazy. It is also, weaker than the health argument. It has a structural political advantage that’s worth understanding.
Why permanent DST keeps winning
Here’s the asymmetry that explains everything. The benefits of permanent DST flow to industries that can directly measure the value of evening daylight in their quarterly earnings. The Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Convenience Stores, the National Golf Foundation. These groups have lobbyists. They write briefs. They contribute to campaigns. They know exactly which Senate offices to call.
The costs of permanent DST are diffuse health harms spread across the population. They show up as heart attacks in cardiology wards, accidents on dark winter roads, kids falling asleep in school, marginally worse productivity at marginal jobs. None of these cost centers has a lobbyist. The AASM has issued position papers. They do not have a PAC.
Marco Rubio’s Sunshine Protection Act, which would make DST permanent year-round nationwide, passed the US Senate on March 15, 2022. Most senators who voted for it didn’t realize they were specifically voting for permanent DST rather than permanent standard time. The bill was framed as “ending the time change.”
It then stalled in the House. About twenty US states have passed laws to switch to permanent DST contingent on federal authorization. The federal Uniform Time Act currently allows states to opt out of DST entirely (Arizona and Hawaii do), but not to adopt permanent DST without federal action.
Basically, the policy with the better health evidence has no organized lobby, and the policy with worse health evidence keeps almost passing.
The 1974 attempt
Permanent DST has, in fact, been tried. Recently. In the United States.
In response to the 1973 oil crisis, President Nixon signed legislation putting the country on year-round DST starting January 1974. The idea was that the energy savings would help offset the embargo.
Approval cratered within months. The reason was dark winter mornings. Sunrise in the northern US in January, on permanent DST, doesn’t happen until after 8 AM in much of the country. School buses were picking up children before sunrise. There were fatal accidents. Several states recorded children killed walking to school in the dark.
Congress repealed it after eight months. The country went back to the biannual switch and has stayed there.
There’s a more recent test case: Russia adopted permanent DST in 2011. Moscow’s winter sunrises drifted to nearly 10 AM. Within three years, deeply unpopular, the country reversed course and switched to permanent standard time in 2014.
So we have two natural experiments, both at high northern latitudes, both ending the same way. Permanent DST as a policy lasted eight months in the US and three years in Russia. Both reversals happened because of dark winter mornings, which is exactly the regime the chronobiologists warn about.
What in the EU is happening
In 2018, the European Commission ran a public consultation on whether to abolish the seasonal time change. 4.6 million Europeans responded, of whom 84% wanted it ended. It was the largest public consultation in EU history at the time. (Caveat: about 3 million of those responses came from Germany, which the EU Commission acknowledged skewed the result. Even with that caveat, the signal was overwhelming.)
The European Parliament voted in March 2019 to end mandatory DST by 2021, with each member state choosing whether to settle on permanent summer or permanent winter time.
Then it died in the Council of the EU. Not because anyone disagreed about ending the switch. Because nobody could agree on whether they were ending it toward summer or winter. The fear, perfectly reasonable, was that if each country chose independently, the EU single market would end up with a patchwork. Germany on permanent winter, France on permanent summer, an hour difference between Paris and Berlin that hadn’t existed in living memory.
Then Brexit happened. Then COVID. Then Ukraine. The DST proposal slid permanently down the agenda. As of 2026, it’s effectively dead, not because nobody can resolve which permanent time to adopt before the next crisis lands.
Mexico did the thing
The cleanest recent move came from Mexico, which abolished DST nationwide in October 2022, keeping permanent standard time. They left exceptions for the northern border states that need to stay aligned with the US for cross-border commerce.
The early returns are positive. Some grumbling about summer evenings ending sooner. No mortality data yet (these things take years to show up clearly), but no political pressure to reverse either. As of 2026, Mexico is the closest thing we have to a clean test of “permanent standard time at high latitudes” in a developed economy, and it appears to be working.
Get to the point already sheesh.
This is what I think. Standard time wins, and by a lot, but maybe they both suck.
The argument is one sentence: standard time is anchored to the actual sun. Permanent DST is anchored to whatever made the National Golf Foundation’s quarterly easier to forecast. One of those is a measurable physical fact. The other is the lobbying preference of an industry sector.
The 1974 experiment in the US and the 2011-2014 experiment in Russia both told us what happens at northern latitudes on permanent DST: dark winter mornings, kids walking to school before sunrise, fatal accidents, collapsing public approval. Those are real objections. They’ve been tested. Twice.
Here’s the part nobody want’s to say. If restaurants, retailers, golf courses, and tourism boards want longer evening daylight for commerce, they can change their own hours. Open later in summer. Close later in summer. Run “summer hours” promotions like grown-ups. That’s a marketing-department problem, not a federal one. We do not need to make 330 million Americans get up in the dark in January so the National Association of Convenience Stores can sell more Slurpees after work.
But here’s my One more thing, Standard-vs-DST is downstream of a bigger problem. Civil time has always been a political construct dressed up as physics. Time zones aren’t natural features of the planet. They’re lines drawn in the 1880s so railroads could publish schedules. Within any single zone the sun is overhead at noon in some town and an hour off in another. We rounded the difference and called it good.
Standard time is the more honest version of that compromise. At least it tries to keep the wall clock close to the actual sun. But neither permanent option is the real fix. The real fix would be admitting that the inherited time-zone system is a railroad-era hack we never updated. That’s a bigger fight than DST, and no country is seriously having it yet. We’ll come back to that again in the future.
Pick standard time. Stop switching. Let the industries that want longer evenings adjust their own hours.
Solvem those problems!
Tomorrow’s problems are all about the amount of Gregs we have on calendars.
Sources
- AASM Position Statement on Daylight Saving Time — Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (2020). The American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s argument for permanent standard time, grounded in circadian-entrainment research showing morning light is the dominant phase-setter.
- AMA calls for permanent standard time — American Medical Association (2022). The AMA’s official policy supporting permanent standard time, citing cardiovascular events, strokes, and motor vehicle accidents tied to the transitions.
- S.623 - Sunshine Protection Act of 2021 — Congress.gov. The official legislative history of Marco Rubio’s bill to make DST permanent nationwide. Passed the US Senate by unanimous consent on March 15, 2022; died in the House without a vote.
- Daylight Saving Time | State Legislation — National Conference of State Legislatures. The authoritative tracker of state-level DST bills, including the roughly twenty states with conditional permanent-DST laws awaiting federal authorization.
- 15 U.S. Code Chapter 6 — Weights and Measures and Standard Time — Cornell Law / Legal Information Institute. The text of the Uniform Time Act, which allows states to opt out of DST (Arizona and Hawaii do) but not to adopt permanent DST without federal action.
- Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act of 1973 — Wikipedia. Legislative history of the Nixon-era year-round DST experiment, including the January 1974 start, the collapse in approval (79% → 42%), the child-safety incidents, and the October 1974 repeal.
- Time in Russia — Wikipedia. Comprehensive history of Russian time-zone policy, including Medvedev’s 2011 adoption of permanent DST, the deeply unpopular dark-winter-morning consequences, and Putin’s 2014 reversal to permanent standard time.
- Summertime consultation: 84% want Europe to stop changing the clock — European Commission press release (August 2018). The official summary of the 4.6 million-response public consultation, the largest in EU history at the time, with the Germany-participation caveat acknowledged.
- Mexico ends daylight saving time — Associated Press (October 2022). Coverage of the Mexican Senate vote ending DST nationwide, with exceptions for northern border municipalities.
- Time zones / DST around the world — timeanddate.com. Country-by-country tracker of DST observance.
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Day 21: "DST is Dumb"
Most people think daylight saving time has something to do with farmers. It doesn’t. It never did. The farmers, in fact, hated it. DST shifts the workday by an hour, but it doesn’t shift the cows or the dew, and farmers fought against it for most of its existence.
DST was invented for lighting. Specifically, for coal. Germany adopted it in 1916, during the First World War, to push evening daylight an hour later so workers would burn less coal lighting their homes after dinner. Britain, the US, and most of Europe followed within two years. Energy savings. That was the entire pitch.
In 1916, this was a defensible bet. Lighting was the dominant residential electricity load. Bulbs were inefficient. Air conditioning didn’t exist. Refrigeration was rare. If you shifted clock-time so people went to bed before they turned on the lights, you measurably saved fuel.
In 2026, none of that is true. Lighting is about 10% of residential electricity use, down from above 40% a century ago. An LED bulb uses about a tenth of the energy of an incandescent. The dominant loads now are heating, air conditioning, and always-on electronics, none of which care what time the sun sets.
We’ve measured this. The cleanest study is Matthew Kotchen and Laura Grant’s 2011 analysis of seven million Indiana electric bills, before and after the state mandated DST statewide in 2006. The result: DST increased residential electricity demand by about 1%. The lighting savings were small, and they were more than wiped out by colder, darker mornings (more heating) and longer sunlit evenings (more AC).
So the entire reason DST exists no longer applies. The thing it was supposed to do, it doesn’t do anymore. Or it does the opposite.
That should have ended the conversation. It didn’t.
The price we pay for nothing
Here’s where it gets dark.
The people who hate DST the most are not the cranks. It’s the cardiologists.
In 2008, two researchers at the Karolinska Institute pulled the entire Swedish national heart-attack registry going back to 1987 and overlaid the DST transition dates. In the first week after the spring transition, heart attack incidence rose by about 5%. The first three days carried most of the spike. Working-age people were hit harder than retirees, which the authors took as evidence that the cause wasn’t the time change itself, but the combination of the time change with having to get to work.
A 2016 Finnish study by Sipilä, Ruuskanen, and colleagues found the same pattern for strokes: roughly 8% elevated risk in the two days after spring forward.
Traffic deaths follow the same curve. Josef Fritz’s 2020 analysis of 732,000 fatal US crashes pinned the spring-forward spike at about 6%. The mechanism is what you’d guess: sleep-deprived drivers, dark morning commutes, more pedestrians out at twilight.
This is a population-scale public health intervention that runs twice a year, that nobody voted for in any meaningful sense, that we’re administering to ourselves because of a coal-conservation policy from the First World War.
The deeper problem: social jet lag
There’s a more chronic effect that doesn’t show up in the spring-Monday data because it runs all year. Sleep scientists call it social jet lag, the persistent misalignment between your body’s circadian clock (anchored to actual sunlight) and your social clock (anchored to whatever the wall says).
DST permanently offsets these by an hour for the months it’s in effect. Your body, which is exquisitely sensitive to morning light as a circadian cue, gets pushed an hour off its natural entrainment. The research is correlational, not causal, but the associations are alarming: increased depression risk, higher BMI, worse academic performance in students, reduced productivity.
This is why every major sleep medicine organization has come to the same position. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the European Sleep Research Society, the AMA. They all want the biannual switch ended. And they want it ended toward standard time, not DST. We’ll get to why tomorrow.
So why are we still doing this?
Polls consistently find that about 7 in 10 Americans want to stop switching the clocks twice a year. That number has been steady across decades. There is, on this one specific question, an unusual degree of national consensus.
And other countries have just done it. Mexico ended DST in 2022. Iceland, Russia, Turkey, Argentina, and a long list of others abolished it years or decades ago. The European Parliament voted to end DST across Europe in 2019. (Implementation has stalled in Brussels, but the vote happened.) The world has a working playbook for “stop switching.” We just don’t use it.
The reason it persists in the US is not that people want it. It’s that the question of what we’d switch to hasn’t been resolved, and Congress can’t agree on anything anyway. (I’m starting to think we should rename them. The Incongruous, maybe.) Without a deal on the destination, the status quo wins.
DST should have died forty years ago, when central air conditioning replaced lightbulbs as the thing your house actually runs on. We’re keeping a public-health intervention because two camps can’t agree on which version of fake time we should freeze.
Time should be time. Just pick one. Stop switching.
Tomorrow: the political fight between permanent standard time and permanent DST. Two camps, both confident, with the strange fact that the camp the data points to is the one losing.
Sources
- The Real Reason We Have Daylight Saving Time — History.com. Covers the WWI coal-conservation rationale and explicitly debunks the farmer myth.
- Daylight Saving Time, Explained — Smithsonian Magazine. Walks through the Germany-1916 adoption, the spread to Britain and the US, farmer opposition, and the Benjamin Franklin satirical-essay origin myth.
- Does Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Indiana — The Review of Economics and Statistics (2011). Kotchen and Grant’s massive billing study proving DST increases electricity demand due to heating and cooling loads.
- Impact of Extended Daylight Saving Time on National Energy Consumption — US Department of Energy (2008). The official report finding a meager 0.5% electricity savings during the 2007 extension.
- Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) — U.S. Energy Information Administration. The authoritative survey of US residential electricity end uses. Heating, cooling, and water heating dominate today’s household electricity mix; lighting’s share has fallen sharply with LED adoption.
- LED Lighting — US Department of Energy, Energy Saver. The official efficiency comparison: ENERGY STAR LEDs use at least 75% less energy than incandescents, with the rest of the energy in old bulbs lost as heat.
- Shifts to and from Daylight Saving Time and Incidence of Myocardial Infarction — New England Journal of Medicine (2008). The Swedish registry study showing a 5% spike in heart attacks on the Monday after spring-forward.
- Changes in ischemic stroke occurrence following daylight saving time transitions — Sipilä, Ruuskanen, et al. (2016). The Finnish nationwide study documenting an 8% elevated stroke risk in the days following the spring transition.
- A chronobiological evaluation of the acute effects of daylight saving time on traffic accident risk — Current Biology (2020). Josef Fritz’s analysis of 732,000 fatal crashes, pinning down the 6% spike in traffic fatalities.
- AASM Position Statement on Daylight Saving Time — Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (2020). The official position of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine advocating for permanent standard time to eliminate social jet lag.
- AMA calls for permanent standard time — American Medical Association (2022). The AMA’s official policy statement supporting the permanent adoption of standard time, citing the spikes in cardiovascular events, strokes, and motor vehicle accidents tied to the transitions.
- Mexico ends daylight saving time — Associated Press (October 2022). Coverage of the Mexican Senate vote ending DST nationwide, with exceptions for northern border municipalities.
- Time zones / DST around the world — timeanddate.com. Comprehensive country-by-country tracker of DST observance, including the long list of nations on permanent standard time.
I’d appreciate a follow. You can subscribe with your email below. The emails go out once a week, or you can find me on Mastodon at @[email protected].