Bill to end Daylight Time passes first test

At last, some good news out of Sacramento.

A San Jose assemblyman, Democrat Kansen Chu, has filed a bill to put it up to the people whether to end Daylight Saving Time. I believe that given the chance the people would put it to sleep permanently.

The bill already has cleared its first committee, according to reporter Alexei Koseff in the Sacramento Bee.

If approved by a two-thirds majority of both houses, Koseff writes, and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, it would put a measure on the ballot asking voters whether the state should eliminate the practice. It couldn’t happen soon enough.

The old shibboleth that Daylight Saving Time somehow saves energy has been debunked for quite a while. On the contrary, it can cost energy by pushing us to run our air conditioners longer in the summer and furnaces longer in the winter.

The practice is unpopular. According to research done by the South Jersey Times, more than 60 percent of Americans believe Daylight Saving Time is a waste of effort and ought to be abolished.

They note that Arizona, Hawaii and Alaska don’t observe it, and those states get along just fine. Our cats, Mrs. Doud and I used to live in Arizona, and we found it quite refreshing not to have to set our clocks forward in the spring and set them back in the fall. We always got to church on time, and to work on time, and there was plenty of daylight to use as we pleased. (Just to put the record straight, the cats didn’t go to church, but their catnaps stayed the same, regardless of whether the suckers in the rest of the country were on Daylight or Standard time.

Also, it is becoming widely known that DST can be bad for one’s health. The Swedes conducted research that indicated more people suffered heart attacks when their clocks were set forward and their sleep rhythms were interrupted.

Farmers don’t care for DST either, because they already get up early, and don’t see any reason why they should have to get up earlier just because city folks do.

Truly, it would be a good thing if DST were to be consigned to the bin labeled “Curiosities of History.”