Near the end of February, Senate Bill 1548 would have ended daylight savings time in most of the state of Oregon, excluding a small area of southeastern Oregon in the Mountain Time Zone, and kept the state permanently on Standard Time was narrowly defeated in the Oregon State Senate. However, an amended version of the bill, which will only abolish daylight savings if California and Washington do the same, will put the issue in front of Oregon’s senate yet again. If the three states can agree to maintain standard time year-round, it would eliminate the useless and inconvenient disruption of our natural sleep rhythms.
Although the exact origin of daylight savings time can’t be pinpointed, it was first observed in Germany in 1916, according to CBS News. Several European countries followed soon after Germany. According to the Astronomical Applications Department, the US also followed in 1918, but daylight savings time was repealed soon after in 1919 and the country did not observe it again until World War II.
The purpose of moving the clocks forward an hour during the summer was to save fuel by using less artificial lighting. Since this change moves an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening, it extends the hours of daylight in a day.
This is not the first time that legislators have tried to put a state or the country on a consistent time schedule throughout the year. According to CBS News, Arizona and Hawaii opted out of daylight savings soon after the Uniform Time Act was passed in 1966, which established a system of uniform daylight savings time throughout the nation.
Some lawmakers have attempted to make daylight savings time permanent instead of standard time. Standard time is clock time rather than solar time. Oregon and Washington passed a bill in 2019 that would have kept the two states permanently on daylight savings time, but have since been waiting for approval from the President and Congress to make this time change, according to KGW.
The US Senate passed a Sunshine Protection Act in 2023 that would have made daylight savings the new standard time year-round, but the bill did not progress past that. Many scientists oppose maintaining daylight savings time year-round instead of standard time, arguing that standard time is more aligned with our natural circadian rhythms. This permanent switch to daylight savings time would also force many people to commute to work in the dark and could lead to traffic accidents, OPB explains.
Daylight savings may have once had a purpose, but in the modern age, we don’t need to extend daylight hours. We have artificial lighting in every corner of the country, and most people aren’t relying on that extra hour of sunlight in the evening for work. It just takes an hour of sleep away from us in the spring, making us more tired than many of us already are.
