Our institutions are asleep, and continue to impose foreseeable harms via bad time policy. Can we wake up and find the energy to rethink time?
Ah, spring. The season of new beginnings and possibilities, the glimpses of drier and warmer weather: truly spring is the season of hope. You can let go of that guilt associated with your crumbled New Year resolution(s) – spring offers that chance to begin again.
And yet, once again, we rushed headlong into one of the inanest policies we have in the UK and across much of Europe (although there are exceptions). To put it truthfully, with mounting research, it becomes increasingly up there with the stupidest. I’m talking, of course, about our bi-annual clock changes, our “springing forward” and “falling back” for the alleged goal of daylight saving. I say “alleged” as, when the clocks went forward on 26th March 2023 from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to British Summer Time (which is a form of Daylight Saving Time (DST)), while it is often suggested that this temporal magic trick conjures up an “extra” hour of daylight in the evening via the “loss” of an hour of morning daylight. This is of course trivially false: the amount of daylight on a given day is completely independent of what clocks say. There is no daylight saving.
Instead, bi-annual clock changes must be thought of as forced jetlag or what Matthew Walker in Why We Sleep describes as a global experiment in which ‘1.5 billion people are forced to reduce their sleep by one hour or less for a single night each year’. That we must forcibly adjust our biological clocks twice a year is evidence of how divorced our social clocks are from the sun clock.
Daylight Saving Time (DST): An ecological and safety-promoting silver bullet?
Whenever DST was first introduced in Europe during WWI by Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary, and then by the UK and other European states (as well as the US), its ostensible goal was that of energy (specifically coal) conservation in the context of the war-effort. This line of thinking remains prominent: activist groups such as 10:10 Climate Action (now known as “Possible”) ran their “Lighter Later” campaign between 2010-12 for permanent DST partially due its apparent ecological credentials. Last year, a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords suggested the UK moving to double summer time (equivalent to harmonising the UK with Central European Time) to leverage such projected reduced energy usage for the purposes of easing the cost of living crisis.
The logic is simple: by “gaining” that hour of daylight in the evening, populations (who tend to be more active in the early evening rather than in the early morning) will have reduced energy demand (less need for artificial light and heat, less greenhouse gas emissions, more time spent outdoors). Although there is certainly no consensus on this, the approximate tends to be that there something like a 0.3-0.5% reduction in overall electricity use (see here, here, and here) during periods of DST – certainly not an insignificant number.
Furthermore, the argument extends that DST, principally by lightening the evening commute, reduces road casualties, with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accident’s having an ongoing campaign on the issue.
More sunlight, less energy consumption, cheaper bills, and less road casualties. Is there anything that Daylight Saving can’t solve?
The Costs of Clock Change
The supposed reduced energy usage via DST is, however, a debated point, with some studies (see here and here) indicating that it actually increases energy consumption, for example because the reduced use of lighting is more than offset by other behaviours (e.g. increased use of air conditioning in the evening, heating in the morning, or car use in the longer evenings). Impacts on health can also be empirically debated – with increased strokes accompanying clock-change as well as a number of other acute effects, and indeed in certain contexts there is evidence that it may in fact be the darker mornings that DST brings that brings about increased road accident risk.
All of this is to say that the balance sheet for the benefits of DST is ambiguous at best. DST is not popular amongst scientists who research biological rhythm And further still, as I discussed elsewhere, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythm published a position paper underlining their arguments as to why the best option from their chronobiological perspectives would be to (1) end bi-annual clock changes, and (2) institute permanent standard time (which, in the UK, would be GMT).
Bi-annual clock changes themselves, however, appear to have little to no support. (Indeed, they may be the key variable in many of the health-related risks.) However, in both the US and the EU, recent years have seen pushes to end our temporal yo-yoing reach political dead-ends. The issue of clock changes appears to lack political clout: explaining its tendency to be both a (rare) non-partisan issue, but simultaneously one which institutions lack the political energy to change.
What is the Future of Time?
While ending our twice-yearly see-saw seems crucial, we also need to think beyond the paradigm of a cost-benefit analysis of bi-annual clock changes in order to generate new thinking and new momentum behind time policies.
Instead, we need an integrated approach to time policies which can connect up issues that we already care deeply about: working time, free time, the length of the working week, electoral cycles, retirement, waiting times, just to name a few. A new chronopolitics is necessary to mobilise us to join these important issues together and create new forms of general temporal autonomy.
As we know from our experiences with DST, time is changeable (indeed it is itself movement and change). How do we want to change it?