daylight saving time . welcome. i m looking forward to talking with you about this. i m happy to join you. i know you are a novelist by trade. what got you interested in this topic? it was simple. i was 45 years old. i put my finger in the face of the clock one october and i thought, how am i serving american agriculture exactly? i grew up with the farmer myth and thought there aren t things i have been doing for this long that i don t understand. i started to talk to friend and everyone had the same idea i had. we were all wrong, of course. that s how it began. what was the farmer millioyt what s the truth? i grew up thinking somehow we did daylight saving to help the farmers get the produce to market. farmers were the only americans who really used morning sunlight so say it s 1916 and they have to get the crops harvested, they need the sun to see them and the
and the way we produce electricity. there has been a 100-year effort to try to squeeze a drop of oil out of the clock and it has yet to work. nixon tried it during the oil embargo. a long-time opponent of daylight saving time, nixon got desperate during the embargo, turned to year-long daylight saving. it was such a failure that within two months he had to rescind the policy. cut to 2005, the energy act. congress, again, its favorite energy saving proposition is daylight saving and there is a reason for it. it doesn t ask americans to conserve. it has no direct cost to taxpayers so it s fantastically popular though it doesn t do a discharge thing. around the 2005 change because they voted on it in 2005 but it went into effect in 2w0u. 2007. that s right. there was a study by the department of energy that said extending daylight saving time
by a few weeks would save like 1.3 terawatts of electricity. it would save all this electricity. did they not account for other energy we would use more of or do you dispute that we would save that electricity? there are two things. first of all, energy use is variable year to year. there have been dozens of studies. the most comprehensive study was in indiana right after they adopted daylight saving. india indianans were paying 8.6 million a year in energy costs for daylight saving. this is the most important thing the department of energy didn t look at in their study and has never done a full study of. since 1930 the petroleum industry has known this when americans are given extra sunlight in the evening it absolutely changes our habits. we go to the ballpark and the mall, but americans don t walk there, we drive.