Why daylight saving time is bad for the environment (Toronto ...

Always sold as a conservation measure, the practice of daylight savings actually jacked electricity use in homes across one central U.S. state by up to four per cent, according to a new American study.

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Instead of saving electricity and money by adding an extra hour of sunlight to evenings most of the year, it cost Indiana homes an extra $8.6 million in electricity bills – mostly from chugging air conditioners – each year. And since 95 per cent of that extra energy was generated by coal-fired power plants, that meant much more atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide was spewed into the air.

Expanded nationally, those results would translate to at least two coal-fired electricity plants pumping power just to feed the daylight savings habit.

"In Indiana, I can tell you unambiguously now, there are social and environmental costs associated with daylight savings time because of the pollution emissions and carbon dioxide emissions contributing to climate change," Kotchen says.

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Since first conceived of by Benjamin Franklin more than two centuries ago, the principle behind daylight savings has always been to save on lighting bills. But what the American inventor couldn't envision in 1784 was the rise of the power-sucking central air conditioner. In Indiana, people might not have been flipping on the lights when they returned home after work. But they were cranking their air conditioners, because that extra hour of evening sunlight meant another hour of "solar build-up on your house," says Kotchen.

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Another way daylight savings might be fuelling our warming climate? Increased carbon dioxide fumes sputtering out of car tailpipes, says Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. Last March's early spring forward coincided with increased gas prices at the pumps.

But the hikes had no effect on gas sales, a result dubbed by many analysts as the "daylight savings effect," he says.

"When you give people more light after work, they do go to the mall or ball park and they don't walk there. They get in their cars," says Downing, adding that in the 1930s, the petroleum industry lobbied hard to reintroduce daylight savings.

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The practice was first introduced, temporarily, in the United States during World War I, and then again during World War II. In 1966, it was reintroduced across most of the United States and Canada, beginning the last Sunday in April and ending six months later in late October. Since then, it has been expanded twice.

While energy conservation has always been the window dressing, the true motivation was repeatedly economic, says Downing, who spent two years reading all the U.S. congressional and senate hearings on DST dating back to 1919.

"The most persistent lobby on behalf of daylight savings has long been retailers and merchants. If you give people more light when they leave work, they will stop and shop on their way home," says Downing, a writing professor at Tufts University.

"There is a reason we continue to get daylight savings under the rubric of energy conservation because as a policy, it costs individual consumers nothing and asks them to conserve nothing. So it's wildly popular," he says.

"Unfortunately, it's entirely ineffective."

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