One of the issues that tends to have massive agreement (like 90%) is the desire to stop switching clocks twice a year. The only disagreement is whether to do permanent standard time or permanent daylight savings time. So far the most politically successful cohort has been the permanent DST group who have managed to get a bill passed which declares that Utah will adopt permanent DST if certain conditions are met: 1) Congress passing legislation to make it legal, and 2) multiple neighboring states moving to permanent DST as well.
In advance of the next legislative session let me offer my fellow Utah citizens the reasons why we can and should abandon that impotent legislation and make November 3, 2024 the last time Utah ever had to change its clocks.
Advantages of standard time
- Current law allows us to end this silliness without a literal act of Congress. States currently have the authority to adopt permanent standard time but not permanent DST.
- If we switch to standard time there is already a built in defined timezone. Utah currently uses the America/Denver timezone but a switch to permanent standard time moves us to the America/Phoenix timezone. Moving to permanent DST would mean making a new timezone or remembering that we are in America/Mexico City.
- Standard time is naturally better for humans at a biological level. As succinctly stated by the British Sleep Society, “given the choice between natural light in the morning and natural light in the afternoon, the scientific evidence favours light in the morning.”
- If we were to pass a bill early in the legislative session it could go into effect before we will otherwise move our clocks forward to “capture an extra hour of evening sunlight” during the summer for extended evening recreation (the argument of the permanent DST cohort) as if we don’t already know how to entertain ourselves long after dark for half the year anyway and would still have to for 4 months a year with permanent DST.
- Lastly, those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. Half a century ago the country decided to give permanent DST a 2 year trial run. They scrapped the trial in under a year because of the extremely late winter sunrises. Admittedly, that’s an even greater problem in Maine or Montana than in Salt Lake City but why should we doom our Logan citizens to 9:15AM sunrises in addition to maintaining the tortures of parents trying to put their five year olds to bed with a 9:00PM sunset?
Join Arizona to create a corridor of permanent standard time. We can switch from Denver to Phoenix time without waiting on the feds to end clock switching, adopt the clock scheme that is most in harmony with biology, and do so without becoming a time island.