Sunday, March 11, 2007

Daylight Savings Dwindling

So today we threw the daylight to the tail end of the day, supposedly to save energy, but the energy it takes to change the clocks and systems in our house already offsets any energy saved. I'm sure that there are others who, like the researchers at a university in California, find that there is no savings in electricity and that overall usage increases.

So we wonder why the media must raise concerns to the level of an alarm with dire warnings that the collapse of technological society is immanent. Isn't March Madness enough? Must we compound it by fumbling to set our watches and clocks? Where on earth is it all headed? Perhaps to the moon, whose friendly face seems to shine through even the most muddled of time changes, even as it inches further and further away from the earth each year. Try setting your clock to the moon in another 50,000 years!

For some reason this time-change loomed more devastatingly than the change of the century. Some were even prone to claim we were altering the Mayan calendar and accelerating our doom before 2012. Now we learn that for all our efforts, daylight is continuing to slip through our fingers. It is enough to make you reconsider the whole affair. Even Australia is contemplating making daylight savings time permanent in an effort to bolster its economy, encourage a baby boom, and defeat clock tampering once and for all.

But the most important news is that we are losing the energy battle. It appears that the more daylight we save, the more energy we consume. It's a helluva way to run a railroad --- which, by the way, used to be so reliable you could set your clock by it!

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