In May, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 48-1 in favor of the Sunshine Protection Act. The U.S. Senate voted unanimously in March 2022 to make daylight saving time permanent but the House never took up the measure in the face of opposition. The proposal the House will consider next week would allow states to opt out.
You like not being able to be outside?
I’d rather have them move the clock an hour backwards in summer. Summer days are so hot nowadays that you can’t be outdoors until after the sun goes down. Summer nights are nice, summer evenings aren’t. With DST you have to go to bed by the time you can be outdoors so you effectively can’t be out during weekdays.
I don’t agree at all. I have a ton of outdoor activities after work that get cut off when winter time doesn’t give me any daylight to do them. The heat isn’t the problem; the lack of evening daylight is the problem.
I don’t see how an additional hour in winter would help if you have a normal 9-5 job. Does it matter if it gets dark at 4 or 5 in the afternoon when either way it’s dark before you get off work?
I think the idea of 9-5 being “normal” is a stereotype that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If it was ever actually “normal”, it was in a bygone era. I don’t actually have anyone in my social circles who starts a scheduled morning shift after 8:00AM. Most people seem to start morning work shifts between 6:00 and 7:30. My last (manufacturing) employer had regular shifts 07:00-15:30, 15:00-23:30, and 23:00-07:30.
The only people in my social circles who might work 9-5 are people on flexible schedules, who are already free to ignore the biannual time change.
That being said, the earliest standard-time sunset in my area is around 4:30PM. Evening twilight lasts until 5:00. No daylight, no twilight for this 9-5 standard time worker.
With permanent DST, this supposedly “normal” 9-5 shift worker gets sunset at 5:30, and half an hour of twilight after that. They get at least 60 minutes of evening daylight in the darkest of winter in December/January. They get much more than that hour in November, February, and March.