Permanent Daylight: Changing Daylight-Saving Time isn't a new idea

On Today's episode of the 5 Things podcast:

If you think the idea of changing Daylight-Saving Time is new, think again. It's been thought of before. Even done before in the 1970's. If it's been done before and didn't work out, why did the U.S. Senate pass it unanimously last week? Is it a good idea? We sat down with USA TODAY reporter Celina Tebor to talk about America's first attempt to make Daylight-Saving Time permanent. What happened? And why didn't it last? We also talked to USA TODAY's Shannon Green to get her thoughts on making it permanent. Hear our debate on this episode of 5 Things.

For more on the Senate bill to make Daylight Saving-Time permanent, click here and here.

For Shannon Green's article, click here.

To follow James Brown on Twitter, click here.

To follow Celina Tebor, click here.

To follow Shannon Green, click here.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

James Brown: Hello, and welcome to 5 Things. I'm James Brown. It's Sunday, March 20th, 2022. On Sundays we do things a bit differently, focusing on one topic instead of five. This week, we're talking about daylight. A week ago on Sunday morning, I like most Americans took part in a mass ritual. I ran around my apartment changing clocks. Just a few hours ago I got around to changing the clock above my stove, and there's probably some that I missed. That ritual springing forward in March and falling back in November is apparently so much of a pain that Congress is considering stepping in. US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida explains.

Marco Rubio: Well, we Americans are about to suffer yet another ridiculous time change as we now spring forward this weekend. Switching in and out of daylight savings time is outdated and it's only a source of annoyance and confusion. And frankly, it's just dumb. And there's just no other way to say it. As a country, we've dealt with this policy for far too long. 20 states, and a huge majority of Americans want to stay in daylight savings time all year round, and we now have bipartisan and [inaudible 00:01:17] support to do just that. So please let's just lock the clock once and for all and put all this stupidity behind this.

James Brown: The United States Senate unanimously passed a sunshine protection act last week. If the bill makes it through the House of Representatives and is signed by the president, we won't have to change our clocks anymore. This got the team at 5 Things thinking, has this happened before? As was written in the Old Testament, there's nothing new under the sun. Americans have fiddled with daylight savings time before, and as USA Today's Selena [Tebor 00:01:51] explains, it didn't turn out well. She'll tell us what happened in just a few moments. Selena Tebor, welcome to 5 Things.

Selena Tebor: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

James Brown: So I read your piece, by the way, I love the headline, Permanent Daylight. I'm a big Radiohead fan and there's this Radiohead song called Permanent Daylight. So it struck me instantly that way. And then on top of that, the scuttlebutt about changing daylight savings time made me think, man, has anyone ever thought about this before? Then I saw your article. Clearly people have. What happened? Tell us about this.

Selena Tebor: Yeah, so basically we extended daylight savings time to the entire year once before, it was in the seventies. So in 1973, the US was having an energy crisis. And so the Senate and Nixon very quickly passed a bill that would extend daylight saving throughout the whole year in hopes that it would save us some energy. And public approval for the law was pretty high when it got passed. So in December, in 1973, public approval for the law was 79% according to some reporting that the New York Times did back then, but quickly it dropped very, very rapidly. So by February, 1974, only about three months later, public approval dropped to 42%. And there's a few reasons why people just really didn't like it. The first is that people just don't like waking up in the dark.

So the switch happened in January, which is already one of the darkest months of the year. And so sunrises could be as late as 9:30 AM in some parts of the US. And so I think that was a really stark change for some people. It's already hard enough getting up in the mornings in the winter months. And people were also very worried about their kids going to school. People thought that there would be increase in traffic accidents, their kids getting hit on the way to school because it was so dark out. And so by October of 1974, even before a full year had passed, they reversed course and went back to having daylight savings time only be part of the year.

James Brown: What do you think about it? Did you think about what your preferences are on this?

Selena Tebor: Yeah, I was thinking about it. I hate losing that extra hour of sleep honestly, but I think that switching to daylight savings time could be very tough for a lot of people, especially in certain areas of the US where the sun rises really late. And so I'm kind of a proponent of keeping standard time all year long. I think that is the most effective solution. I think that if the US wants to keep daylight savings time for the whole year or keep standard time for the entire year, I think what's really important for them to do is just have a really good public service campaign so that people are aware that this is going to be happening. Preparing people saying the sunrises might be a little later this year or the sunsets might be a little shorter, or prepare to lose an hour of sleep. Because I think the tough thing about the switch for a lot of people is that they don't know it's coming. And so then, boom, they wake up the next morning and they're like, why do I feel terrible? It's because I lost an hour of sleep last night. And so I think more awareness in general will help people just feel better about whatever decision the Senate and Congress makes.

James Brown: Yeah. I would think you are on the right track just with the idea of it's not something you could spring on in even a couple of months. It's something that you'd have to do an extensive campaign on, just sort of educating the public, because even if you do that, not everybody's going to know.

Selena Tebor: Yeah, exactly. So if they can even get a few people to be aware, I think that's better than nothing. And like I said, I think that might have been one of the reasons why people disliked it so much the first time we did it, was because it happened so quickly and people might have not been ready for that change.

James Brown: Selena Tebor, thanks for joining us.

Selena Tebor: Thank you so much for having me.

James Brown: To be honest with you all, I think ending daylight savings time is a terrible idea for many reasons. Some Selena mentioned and others I'll explain shortly. What do you think? Am I off base? Let us know on social media at USA Today or at James Brown TV. My colleague Shannon Green and I disagree on this one. You'll hear us talk it out in just a few moments. Shannon Green, welcome to 5 Things.

Shannon Green: Thanks so much for having me, James. I'm excited to be on the other end of the duties. I'm not hosting today.

James Brown: As so many of you know, Shannon has hosted this for quite some time, especially the Sunday episodes.

Shannon Green: Right. Hi, everyone.

James Brown: And she and I have a bone to pick with each other.

Shannon Green: That's right. Let's go, let's get into it.

James Brown: I loathe, loathe this decision by Congress to change daylight savings. And yes, I know I say it incorrectly. I know it's saving, not savings. I understand. But I loathe this decision, it's a terrible decision, largely because I live in a cold, dark, awful winter place. It's Rochester, New York. It's in Western New York. We're not quite Buffalo, not quite Syracuse, across the lake from Toronto. And with all that lake effect snow, we get about a hundred inches a year. We get lots of wind, lots of cold. On top of that, there's not a whole lot of sunlight. And during the winter, it's already really tough to get up and have to go and record podcasts and have a life when the sun doesn't show up until around 7:00, 7:30 sometimes at the darkest days. And now our government wants to make it 8:00 in the Eastern time zone? And Shannon thinks it's a great idea for some reason. Why?

Shannon Green: Well, I think that maybe I'm suffering from geographic privilege, James Brown, because I am looking at where I live, which is in Northern Virginia, and I think that I'm just not going to that many days where the sun is rising after 8:00 AM. And so when it comes to me and my hyper local area, I'm feeling like the more days that I have where the sun doesn't set before 5:00 PM, the happier I am as a human being. Because you and I, we're journalists. So some journalists tend to wake up really early in the morning to work hard in getting the news out early. But you and I are people who are trying to get the best news that happens during the day into a podcast that publishes overnight. I mean, I think 5:00 AM when 5 Things publishes is a time when most people should be sleeping.

I have a one and a half year old and he wakes up usually around 6:30. Lately he's been sleeping closer to like 7:00 or 7:15 on a really lucky day. And so I kind of wake up with him. I walk him over to daycare. The daycare opens at the earliest at 7:30. So the idea of having to take him over there in darkness is not fun, but I just think that I'm lucky enough that there's not going to be that many days of that based on where I live because of how the sun hits, how the sunlight hits in the Mid-Atlantic Eastern coast of the United States.

And that's not really fair to you. And it's not really fair to people who live in the Northern United States. So I feel like I'm at an impasse because I definitely have sympathy for people in the Northeast, lots of family, cousins, aunts, uncles live in Philadelphia or the suburbs of Philly. And so I feel for you, I feel for the people of Rochester, and I don't know what this means for us, but what I need, James, is to not have to worry about how I'm going to feel on the days that I have to change the clocks, because that is a big hassle twice a year.

James Brown: Well, that was part of Marco Rubio's argument. And he's the Republican Senator from Florida. And his argument was that it causes all sorts of disruption to change clocks twice a year. It's annoying to change the clocks, no doubt, no one likes doing it, but it's not something that's causing such an inconvenience that we need to shift this entirely. How big of an inconvenience was this for you when we had to do this, I believe it was last weekend?

Shannon Green: Yes. So I think people are really concerned about the impact it has on sleep for all human beings, not just kids, not just people who have seasonal effective disorder, which is a real thing. Sadness that comes with less access to sunlight. And there are normal human beings who have trouble concentrating on the days where they have this hour change. There's even studies that I've read about that suggest that car accidents happen more frequently during these times. I feel like I need to cite my research here. So I'd have to look it up, but I've definitely read articles that talk about all the issues that can come up during that immediate time around the changing of the clocks. I personally, this last week, think that a lot of my family and friends plum forgot that the time's just changed on us.

So you just have that feeling of being disoriented and also thinking that my son is waking up way too early. This is not okay that he is up this early. And it's dark in the morning. And so I think it is a strange feeling. And then I think that I really didn't feel quite right until a couple days later, which is yes, it's subtle. Yes, I can handle it. I'm a Jersey girl. I'm tough. I don't have to whine about it. But wouldn't it be nice if everyone didn't have to go through that clock confusion or that... Really not the clock confusion. Better said just that feeling of being disoriented when it comes to your sleep. We had an hour of sleep stolen from us. I don't like it. Why do you think it's so important to change the clocks? Why...?

James Brown: I'm not married to changing the clocks. Well, you know what, I am, I want to keep as much daylight in my life as possible. I think that this was a sensible way to go about it and there's no need to change it. I don't think the disruption's that big. So I feel like this is creating a problem that doesn't exist. I also know that sunlight can be a big boost health wise. I know you've been looking into that a bit too, right?

Shannon Green: I just wrote an article for US Today about having multiple sclerosis. And there's a huge connection between vitamin D and being able to prevent or improve multiple sclerosis. And I think that's true for other health conditions. Basically sunshine is good for I think both your physical health and mental health. And so you're just advocating for the folks of Rochester, the good folks of Rochester to be able to get as much of it as possible. And if that's not democracy, I don't know what is, James.

James Brown: Shannon Green. Thanks for joining me.

Shannon Green: Thanks for having me, James.

James Brown: If you like the show, write us a review on Apple Podcast or wherever you're listening, and do me a favor, share it with a friend. Thanks to Shannon Green and Selena Tebor for joining me, let us know what you think. Our contact information is in the description. Thanks to Alexis Gustin for editing this episode, Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with five things you need to know for Monday. For all of us at USA Today, thanks for listening. I'm James Brown, and as always be well.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Changing Daylight-Saving Time is nothing new: 5 Things Podcast