Sarah Eskreis-Winkler: Lots of reasons to avoid the 25th hour

Many accepted ideas are not grounded in reality per se, but in society's validation of them. Our currency isn't backed by anything, and neither are our clocks.

In fact, time itself is an arbitrary construct. There's really no way of knowing whether time itself is moving at a constant rate. If everything got faster -- the second hand on the clock, your pulse, the earth's rotation -- who would notice? We measure objects and record events, not in absolute terms, but based on their relative position in the space-time continuum.

Nonetheless, agreeing on a common method of measurement is advantageous. Arranging a meeting without an awareness of hours and minutes would result in lots of wasted time, although participants would be at a loss to know exactly what they were squandering.

Time was, every local town had a clock in sync with the cosmos. High noon meant that the sun was overhead. A year meant that the earth had completed a revolution. Standardization -- necessitated by interregional commerce and confusing railroad schedules -- reset the hour of the day so that official time was at odds with the sun's position in the sky. The benefits of homogeneity far outweighed complaints about sundial obsolescence.

Standard time brought order to our lives. Daylight saving went one step further: it manipulated time to serve our interests.

Turning back the clock each fall is a pretty popular practice -- most people welcome the much-needed extra hour of sleep. It's only when spring rolls around that many start to harbor anti-daylight saving sentiments.

But here at Penn, we have an obligation to defend the legacy of DST, because, like almost everything else, it can be traced back to Ben Franklin.

Franklin first suggested the concept as a way to save money on candles and oil lamps. Today, the primary motivation behind daylight saving remains energy conservation. We use less electricity during daylight hours and so moving the clocks forward during the summer months -- delaying the onset of sunset -- cuts down the amount of electrical power we consume each day.

This artificial time shift was first enforced in the United States during the world wars to maximize the number of daylight hours available for war production. Then in 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, establishing DST from April to October.

So why don't we use DST year-round? Actually, it was done briefly during the 1970s energy crisis. We saved 10,000 barrels of oil per day.

Re-implementing this year-round practice will cut oil demand, conserving millions of barrels over the course of a year. It will lessen U.S. dependence on OPEC. It will be popular among environmentalists.

DST extensions were proposed a few years ago in response to the California energy crisis. The California Energy Commission found that it could decrease peak electricity use by as much as 3 percent and cut $1 billion from its power bill by keeping DST year-round.

Furthermore, it's a good public safety measure. Delaying sunset until well after rush hour will cut down on traffic injuries and crime. Year-round DST will also avoid the increase in traffic accidents on the Monday after the time change.

So who's holding us up? The farmers. The Farm Bureau is the main opponent of the measure -- farmers like to get an early start and can't start working until sunrise. Shifting back the daylight hours also limits their ability to take on a second job after dark.

Others adversaries claim year-round DST would compromise the safety of children traveling to school while it's still dark. But studies show that extending DST would save more lives during the evening rush hour than it would risk during the morning. Unfortunately, Congressional committee reports warned politicians that lives saved by the later sunset would go unnoticed while morning accidents would be blamed on supporters of DST legislation.

Let's take advantage of natural sunlight and permanently make high noon 1 p.m. It's a rare opportunity to cut down on oil consumption without actually making any real energy sacrifices.

As it stands, the daylight saving program consists of the U.S. government borrowing an hour of our time in April and returning it to us in October. If nothing else, it's about time we protested the zero interest rates. After all, time is money.

Sarah Eskreis-Winkler is a College sophomore from Wynnewood, Pa.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.