Daylight Savings Time: Arizona Got This One Right

Daylight Savings Time: Arizona Got This One Right

by Marc Pascal

The state that was the third to last to be admitted to the Union on February 14, 1912 (followed by Alaska and Hawaii in 1959) was a backwater place until the late 1960s. Suddenly both old and young and everyone in-between began to move here for the year-round warm sunny weather, spectacular scenery, laid-back lifestyle, and cheap air-conditioned housing. Over the past 20 years, Arizona has grown to find itself with the 5th largest city in the U.S.: Phoenix. Its more than 5.5 million residents live mostly in and around Phoenix, Tucson, and their suburbs.

Arizona took forever to finally adopt the national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. but that did not stop blacks and African-Americans from flocking to this state. Their numbers are still smaller than the Mexicans, Latinos, Whites and Asians who also settled in this state adding to the large number of Native Americans. The European “white” population is only a plurality in this multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and bi-lingual state. However all the Democrats who moved here from California and the Midwest have yet to make major changes in its political power structure.

As a result of this severe recession, its poorly-designed state tax and organizational structure is billions in the red, having been created for a state 1/3 its present population. It is one of the few states in the U.S. where both the Governor and both houses of the State Legislature are firmly controlled by Republicans. They are sane enough not to oppose getting as much federal stimulus assistance as possible while they try to sort out their serious economic and political problems.

What Arizona has always gotten right was its refusal to join the rest of the country and many parts of the world in Daylight Savings Time, requiring clocks to be set ahead in the spring 1 hour and set back 1 hour in the fall.

This ritual started in 1918 and then was abandoned only to be reintroduced during WWII. It was finally enacted into law in 1966, but Hawaii and several U.S. territories also opted out of it.

Scientific research over the past few years has confirmed what Arizonans (and Hawaiians) knew long ago. This 1-hour loss of sleep every springtime and 1 hour gain in sleep every autumn, wreak havoc on our minds, bodies and metabolisms. Heart attacks increase by 5% during the 6 weeks following the springtime move forward (lose 1 hour of sleep) and drop 5% during the 6 weeks following the autumnal move back (gain 1 hour of sleep).

Furthermore, all the claims of productivity and lifestyle benefits, plus saving energy (due to getting more or less sunlight during different key times of the year) have been proven fictitious or grossly overstated by many other studies. Many people also notice that, after these 1-hour changeovers across the U.S., morning sunrises and evening sunsets are greatly exaggerated for about 6 weeks from the same sunrises and sunsets just before the clock changes, further complicating our sleep-wake rhythms.

Instead out here in the land of perpetual warm sunshine, we don’t bother with these stupid bi-annual clock rituals. During the Arizona summer, the temperature continues to increase throughout the day, peaking not around mid-day but during late afternoon. We appreciate the sun going down sooner so the cooler evening air makes going outside possible.

The Nightlife in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe and Glendale is quite lively despite having just gone through another dry sunny day between 100 and 120 degrees. (Temperatures above 111 are nowhere as common as most people think but Arizonans like to brag and scare outsiders to get some laughs.) Generally the difference between the night-time low and the daytime high throughout the year ranges from 20 to 30 degrees. You can deduct about 10 degrees from the highs to account for the incredible dryness (humidity from 0 to 15%) just as one would add 10 degrees around the rest of the nation to account for high summer humidity.

Perhaps we could simply compromise next year and move our clocks just 30 minutes and keep it that way all year around. Even Arizona would make that accommodation and stay in place instead of flopping between Mountain Denver to Pacific Los Angeles Time Zones. We waste over 2 months during the year explaining the time differences every time our friends from elsewhere in the U.S. call us and ask “now what time is it over there?”

Why we care what the time and date are in Greenwich, England, is beyond comprehension for most everyone outside of Great Britain. Considering it is no longer the center of political or economic power, we might prefer some other international standard. President Obama could issue an executive order making Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (it does not follow daylight savings time either) the starting point for counting hours and days, and of course just 30 minutes off from the previous standards.

Some scientists might complain that we would be lax in faithfully keeping time as the Earth circles the sun. Didn’t we have to add an extra second before 2009 started to overcome the disparity between reality and where the Earth actually was in its orbit around the sun?

In fact, the Earth (at around 4.5 billion years of age) is slowing down in its orbit around the sun, located on the outskirts of the Milky Way Galaxy, that is also moving within our ever-expanding universe estimated to have aged 13.5 billion years since the Big Bang. Of course we now owe trillions of dollars as a result of the Big Bust of 2008, but that’s another story. (That might be a good moniker for this economic crisis.)

Besides, what’s 30 minutes among friends when we’re talking about billions of years passing by and trillions of dollars going down the drain?

Marc Pascal obtained his undergraduate and graduate degrees in music, business and law (B.A., J.D. & M.B.A) over 15 years ago from a respected university in Ohio. Between 1986 and 1998, he served for several years as the in-house counsel for 2 large public corporations, and he also periodically practiced law in Cleveland, OH. Between 1991 and 2006, he started and managed 4 different new business ventures in the Midwest with various friends, all of which were a lot more fun. Since 2006, he has been an independent management and business consultant serving various private enterprises in the Phoenix area. He resides there with his spouse of 11 years and their young son. He regularly guest posts, comments and blogs on TMV in order to exorcise his demons since his consulting business has shrunk considerably during the past 3 months.