With Californians staring down the reality of moving their clocks back an hour at 2 a.m. Sunday, North Coast Representative Jared Huffman is touting a bill he’s co-sponsoring that would allow states the option of staying on daylight savings time all year.
When the clocks fall back Sunday morning, we’ll gain an hour of sleep but lose an hour of daylight. Huffman isn’t too bullish on the tradeoff, and remains hopeful the bill he’s co-sponsored with Rep. Bob Bishop (R-Utah) will get some traction before the end of the year.
“I don’t want to extend the year 2020 by a single minute, much less a full hour!” Huffman quipped on Twitter.
In 2018, California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 7 to switch permanently over to daylight saving time but the measure needs to be ratified by a two-thirds vote in the state Senate, which hasn’t happened yet. And even if it did, California would simply join the ranks of a dozen states waiting for required Congressional approval to make the switch — that is, unless the bill co-sponsored by Huffman passes and is signed into law, giving states the right to choose for themselves how to set their clocks.
But for now, remember to set your clocks back an hour before going to sleep Saturday night.
This article appears in ‘Erasure’.
We do NOT lose an hour of daylight! We just swap it from evening to morning. I’m tired of it still being dark at 7:30AM. How about year round standard time instead of year around daylight time?
Exactly, Rod. I sense that this is yet another cynical attempt to convince us that the modern world has little to do with the earth and sun, but is simply a human-made invention that we can alter to our complete comfort– never any inconvenience or allowance for reality! I agree that the time change is funky and unnecessary– but it’s fixed by returning to natural time, where midnight is middle of the night and noon is when the sun is highest in the sky. Not by mandating clocks set to an hour off reality. If people don’t like having it dark so early in the afternoon, they should get up/start work earlier. 9-5 always seemed a little weird when 8-4 centers the work day on the light hours.
I lived in a country where autonomous regions did not use daylight savings time and it was chaos for everyone who believed in punctuality. It further isolated the locals from the more prosperous areas of the country. No one ever knew what time it was. At my business I followed the national time keeping and laid off two fellows who used it as an excuse for not showing up on time for work.