As the rest of the United States prepare for the daylight saving time, several lawmakers are seeking to ensure that people will not be making drastic adjustments to their clocks the next time. Rep. Brad Sherman, a Democrat, is the latest policymaker who has proposed a change in the daylight saving time law. Dubbed as the "double daylight saving time," The Los Angeles Times said Sherman is proposing to move the clock two hours forward in the spring, as oppose to one hour.
Sherman's proposal was a bit odd considering that according to the National Geographic, California benefits mostly from the clock change because the mild weather allows people to stay late outdoors. Moreover, a report by The Energy Department showed that the DST gives 1% energy savings daily in California. Environmental economist Hendrik Wolff of the University of Washington said that the energy savings obtained by certain states like California could be mainly attributed to its location near the in relation to the Mason-Dixon Line
"The North might be a slight winner because the North doesn't have as much air conditioning. But the South is a definite loser in terms of energy consumption. The South has more energy consumption under daylight saving," Wolff had said.
In an earlier report, the US government do not require the states to comply with the change. LA Times said that states like Arizona have shunned practicing forwarding their clocks. Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Marianas Islands also do not put their clocks forward. The newspaper reasoned that the DST compliance is not the change in the number of daylight hours but how society has organized itself to make the best of the daylight hours.
Pundits said that the DST presented a lot of disadvantages lately. Chronobiologist Till Roenneberg at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany said, "The consequence of that is that the majority of the population has drastically decreased productivity, decreased quality of life, increasing susceptibility to illness, and is just plain tired."
