Just What is Daylight Saving…Saving?

I’m not a morning person, but I’ll do my part and get up early if it’s in the national interest. The problem is that it may not be, if you believe the working paper that Ryan Kellogg and Hendrick Wolff have written at Berkeley.  Their paper, "Does Extending Daylight Saving Time Save Energy?" is HERE. And the answer to their rhetorical question is…no.  Parts of Australia tried it in 2000; Kellogg and Wolff found that reduced need for lighting in the evening was almost precisely offset by increased need for lighting in the morning.  More HERE.  We talked to Kellogg this afternoon: “The response I’ve been getting when talking to people is, ‘Well, why are we doing this if this doesn’t save any energy?’” Congress may have acted just a touch hastily in 2005.  The Daylight Saving shift is a few lines in the Energy Policy Act of 2005–which runs 551 pages.  The whole thing is HERE.  (There will be a quiz on its contents on Monday.)  "Daylight Savings"–the "s" at the end is a break from previous law–is Sec. 110 on p. 23.  In the meantime, computer clocks may be confused for a few weeks; we posted more HERE.  If you have a PC that runs something older than Windows XP*, Service Pack 2, Microsoft has a simple update at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst .  (*Note to friends: Yes, yes, there was a typo here; I wrote Windows WP instead of XP.  I do, however, hold the patent on Windows WP, and will gladly sell it to you.) If you’re a Mac user, go to http://www.apple.com/downloads/ and search for "Daylight Saving."  Or just reset the computer’s clock after 2AM Sunday.  And if all this leaves you a little ticked off, you’re welcome to sound off below.