Although Ed Markey, a 75-year-old Democratic senator, does not exactly move like a TikTok star, he decided to record one of those short and somewhat silly videos on March 15 to celebrate that the United States upper house had unanimously approved starting the process. to end the time change.
In it, with the Capitol in the background, he strutted with the grace of a father at his daughter's wedding, exclaiming,
"We're walking on sunshine!"
(We walk in the sun!).
The nod—both to the name of the rule, the Sunshine Protection Act, and to that hit by Katrina & The Waves—was posted on Twitter along with a Spotify playlist (with the expected, frankly:
Summertime
, in Janis Joplin's version;
Time's On My Side
, of Rolling Stones;
You're the Sunshine of My Life
, by Stevie Wonder…).
In addition, the senator wrote: "Daylight saving time unleashes our smiles!".
The enthusiasm of Markey, a legislative promoter with Florida Republican Marco Rubio, seemed justified.
Undoubtedly, it is one of those laws that, beyond the commonplace, affects people's lives: if it prospers in Congress (where its future is uncertain and there are no plans to study it yet) and the president ratifies it Joe Biden (who does not seem to have a formed opinion on the matter), the United States will remain eternally in daylight saving time (known as Daylight Saving Time, DST).
Goodbye to adjusting the clocks in November and March.
As if that were not enough, the vote, which was unanimous —and that does deserve a dance in the America of extreme polarization—, came a couple of days after the country advanced its clocks to lose an hour of sleep and gain it at sunset .
That week it was time to get out of the long winter tunnel, so everyone was happy.
Everyone except the scientific community.
"It's a decision made with the best of intentions, but in the wrong direction," Erik Herzog, professor of biology and neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis, explains in a phone conversation.
Like the rest of the experts who have intervened these days in the debate in the United States, he agrees that changing the time twice a year is not a good idea, but also that if you have to stay with one of the two options much better to opt for winter time.
“There are enough public health, safety and economic reasons,” he says.
"[This change] is going to force us to get up for a significant part of the year at night, with the buzz of an alarm clock instead of with the sunrise."
Herzog runs a nonprofit, nonpartisan association called Save Standard Time.
They want to save DST because they believe it is best for "health, safety, education, productivity, wages, the environment, and civil liberties."
The foundation was created in 2019 by Jay Pea, a retired computer engineer from San Francisco who defines himself on Twitter as "amateur astronomer and fan of circadian medicine", to influence a debate that has intensified in recent years, as has happened also in the European Union, where the Commission approved in 2018 to end the time change after a popular consultation in which 4.6 million people participated (with 84% yeses).
The application of this directive in the 27 member countries has been stalled since then,
More information
Keys about the time change: when is it?
will it be the last?
how does it affect us?
Herzog calculates that of the 7,000 million inhabitants of the planet, "about 6,000 [million] live on the correct schedule."
The rest—like most citizens of Europe and the United States (except those in Arizona and Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and other overseas territories)—change steps twice a year.
They also do it in Mexico (since 1996; this year it will be April 3), although President Andrés Manuel López Obrador does not like the idea (nor the reason: energy savings).
In Chile, they will also advance the time that day (and until September), except in the Magallanes and Antarctica regions.
And those who used to change the clock and stopped doing so have opted for winter time.
These are the cases of Argentina —where the custom was suspended in 2009,
for considering energy savings insignificant and because in the provinces near the Andes mountain range they saw the sun set almost at midnight in summer—or in Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro eliminated summer time two years ago, four months after entering the Government and with the argument that not enough was being saved to justify altering the biorhythms.
In countries close to the equator, such as Colombia, they do not know the problem: there the sun rises and sets with little variation during the four seasons.
What US senators are now seeking was already proven in 1974, with Richard Nixon in the White House and the oil crisis at its height.
"It was a failure, it was approved as an exceptional saving measure [more hours of light, less energy consumption] for a period of two years, but it was removed ahead of time," explains David Prerau, a computer engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of
Seize the Daylight
(Basic Books, 2006), the “definitive book” on… daylight saving time (in this country there is always an essay tailored to any topic of interest).
An advisor to several US governments on the subject, Prerau explains that changing the clock twice a year was originally, like so many others, an idea of Benjamin Franklin, which took shape in England at the beginning of the 20th century and began to be adopted during the two world wars to increase production at the end of the day.
This is how it stayed in some parts, but not in all.
“It varied from state to state, even city to city,” he explains.
In the book he tells how, in the early 1960s, a 30-mile bus ride between Steubenville, Ohio, and Moundsville, West Virginia, required passengers to make seven capricious time changes.
Today, the United States (except Hawaii) is divided into three zones.
In 1966, the customs were unified and in 2007 the current design was established: eight months in summer time,
and four in winter.
And that is still the ideal system for Prerau, who does not support the senators' idea either.
“It's not perfect, but I think staying as we are is the best option;
we won't lose the extra daylight hours of summer, nor will we have to wake up at night in winter,” he says.
That 1970s experiment came too soon for the scientific discipline of neurologist Anne Marie Morse of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
"We cannot know how it affected people's health, because we lack data," she clarifies in a telephone conversation.
But we do know, she adds, what causes a change like the one that will take place this weekend in Spain: "Traffic accidents, heart attacks and other ailments are growing, as well as hospital admissions."
"That is proven to happen in the days following the start of daylight saving time," continues the expert.
"While we don't know what effects it would have if this were made permanent, we are certain that it goes against our circadian rhythms, and we suspect that it will have psychiatric consequences, such as depression,
mood swings or anxiety
That, not to mention that some places will take the worst part.
Prerau calculates that in cities located in the westernmost part of the time zones, such as Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, Seattle or Detroit, it will dawn as late as 9:00.
Why then did senators vote unanimously, amidst so much overwhelming medical evidence?
On the one hand, there is the populist reason.
“People associate DST with spring and summer.
Who doesn't love those seasons?” Morse asks.
And then there are the financial reasons.
Herzog advises following the money.
"The golf, tourism and candy industries support later nights throughout the year," explains Herzog, who recalls that Marco Rubio, perhaps the senator who has most rabidly defended the new law, comes from Florida, where those industries they are powerful.
Interestingly, it was in that State, nicknamed the Sunshine State, where the increase in abuses of children who had to go to class half asleep and at night provoked one of the most furious reactions the last time that, in the mid-1990s, seventy,
With information from
Sonia Corona (Mexico), Naiara Galarraga Cortázar (Brazil), Antonia Laborde (Chile), Federico Rivas Molina (Argentina) and Inés Santaeulalia (Colombia).
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