I’ve written before about how I think that politicians have used Daylight Saving Time as a distraction from some other topic. Probably the clearest example was when Nixon ordered a change the clocks while in the midst of Watergate — in January! (Changing the clocks is always bad, but doing it in January was just cruel.) It didn’t work, and Nixon still left office.
Now we have news from Brazil, which is considering starting DST again after stopping it a couple of years ago. The purported reason? Drought.
But this quote from an excellent AP story is telling:
“The only reason why we’re not seeing greater problems is because of the economic crises of the last few years, and lower consumption than expected.”
That is, the drought is making it so that it’s hard to generate electricity, but people are using less electricity because of massive economic problems.
Also, the COVID situation in Brazil is rotten, in no small part because the president is telling lies about the vaccines. Some god with a sense of humor gave the Brazilian health minister a case of COVID-19 so that he could not attend the U.N. General Assembly this week.
With all that going on… sure… let’s talk about how changing clocks for Daylight Saving Time will fix everything.
In the midst of all the other pain and suffering, they may actually make people start changing clocks again, which will only add to the pain and suffering.
Of course, a part of the problem there may be where they decided to lock the clock. Brazil decided to stop changing, which is the whole goal of this site and the #LockTheClock movement. And I have always said, and I honestly believe, that if you lock the clock in standard or daylight time, it just doesn’t matter all that much, as long as you stop the changing.
But my goal is to make sure that when stop changing, we stop changing for good. I’d hate to see a place stop changing clocks, and then start again because they picked the wrong time. Is that the case in Brazil? It’s hard to say from the polls as reported in that story.
I have to wonder… would this be coming up again if they had decided to stay in Daylight time permanently? Maybe if they had done that, people would be happier (as is indicated by a couple of studies you can find on my research page) and so there wouldn’t be any talk about giving people longer days in the summer, which is now on its way in that Southern Hemisphere country.
Brazil clearly has lots of problems. I hope they don’t compound them by going back to the barbarism of changing the clocks twice a year.
I was planning on writing about a different story in the island state of Samoa. There were a few tweets and stories I saw that this independent country in the South Pacific was going to abandon Daylight Saving Time.
But, being an old reporter, I thought maybe I should check it out. The news sources seemed a bit sketchy.
If your mother says she loves you, the old journalism aphorism goes, check it out.
Sure enough, when I went to the newspaper of Apia, the largest city and capital of Samoa, there were no stories. The government website and twitter feed had nothing. It seems like that big of a change would have warranted at least a tweet.
So, I’m still digging around. Samoa has a rich history of changing the clock to look after their own interests. Back in 2011 the country skipped a whole day, Dec. 30, so that their days and times would match up better with New Zealand and Australia. That forced map and globe makers to redraw the international date line. So, that’s cool, and could indicate that they may have gotten rid of clock-changing. Most other islands governments closer to the equator, including Hawaii and Puerto Rico, have no DST clock changing.
Did they actually get rid of DST? When I hear back from anyone official, I’ll update this post and tweet about it.
Our last stop on our global tour for this post is Australia, where some new research shows exactly what we’ve seen everywhere else in the world, that people generally prefer having more light later in the day relative to the clocks.
In a survey of the part of Australia that sticks with Standard Time all year, survey respondents said that they would rather have Daylight Saving Time.
Just as mentioned above, geography matters for how much people want to have more daylight later in the day. “Dr. Sigler explained that the further away from the equator you were, the more you experienced the benefits of daylight savings.”
The story, unfortunately, does not get into the problems with the clock changing. It’s a bit hard to tell, but it would seem that people there would rather change the clocks twice a year just to get more sunlight later in the day during the summer. It doesn’t appear that they were asked about if they just wanted year-round Daylight Saving Time. Too bad. Maybe after the vote in Alberta, they will consider that as a possibility.