Title. How does the amount of daylight one gets affect oil usage?
In: Economics
The stereotypical workday in the United States is 9 am to 5 (or 530) pm. You will notice that the workday lasts from 3 hours before noon to 5 hours after noon.
It is also true that people are generally more active after work than before work. Most people choose to do recreational activities after work — you don’t get too many baseball games starting at 8 am local time, but there are more than a few that start around 8 pm.
Because we go by clock time instead of by solar time, the effect of daylight saving time is to shift the pattern of activity of people so that more of it occurs during natural daylight. Compared to having clock noon at solar noon, shifting the clock day an hour later means that 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. are equally bright instead of 9:00 a.m. being substantially brighter than 5:00 p.m. — and so are 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., rather than the equivalents being 7 a.m. and 5 p.m.
In other words, it does a better job of aligning the period of peak activity with the period of daylight. In theory, this might reduce electrical use because your baseball game might not need to turn the stadium lights on, but if it were occurring an hour later relative to solar noon, it might have to do so. The same is true of literal office lighting, where you might be able to get away with fewer lights or even no lights during more of the work day if the work day were better aligned with the solar day, and that means making solar noon later compared to clock noon.
In practice, especially now, it doesn’t really make a difference. But that was the theory at the time.
If we lived on a planet that was always dark, we would have to constantly burn fossil fuels to keep the lights on.
If we lived on a planet where the sun never stopped shining, we would never burn fossil fuels for lighting.
Seasons cause sunrise and sunset to shift, meaning that in the fall and winter it will be dark earlier in the day. If we all agree that time shifts forward and backward each year to reduce the impact of the shifting sunsets, we’ll have more daylight, and less darkness, meaning we burn fewer fossil fuels.
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