Come Sunday, March 12, at 2:00 a.m. EST, Daylight Saving Time will begin. We’ll lose an hour because the 20th-century federal government decided we should. Then on November 5th we’ll gain an hour, and be plunged into darkness. For over half a century, we’ve accepted that this cycle is normal.
But dozens of states have introduced Daylight Saving Time-related legislation to end this cycle, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. States want to adopt “Daylight Saving Time,” the time standard of summer, permanently, rather than switch to “Standard Time,” the name for the winter time system that sets us back an hour.
In the last five years, 19 states have already passed legislation to make it happen. Who are they, and why are their people still plodding around in darkness?
The reason is more or less that the government should’ve settled on time a century ago. It implemented Daylight Saving Time during World War I to save on energy. After the war, it set the clock back again for farmers who wanted another early morning work hour and then enacted an optional DST again during World War II. It finally codified the spring forward-fall back federal convention in 1966. States can get out of the change, but that’s a false dilemma; they can only pick the icy confines of Standard Time, not year-round Daylight Saving Time. So we go with door number two, resetting our biological GPS to Iceland at risk of depressive episodes and cardiovascular disease.
Read More: How to Beat Daylight Savings Time and Have a Winter of the Sun
The only states and territories which picked the former option are those with sun to spare: Hawaii, most of Arizona (except for the Navajo Nation), American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Marco Rubio introduced legislation in 2019 to break the pointless time trap, but for now, sun-starved citizens are stuck with stupid holdover time law when people got up early.
Here are the states that have passed measures to get on Daylight Saving Time.
This story was originally published on November 5th, 2021. It has been updated to reflect new legislation.
