Since we supposedly live in a free-market economy, it’s hard to understand why we need any federal energy policy, let alone the bill that President Bush is expected to sign after it passed Congress last week.
For starters, oil companies are reporting record profits. So why do they need billions in tax incentives? We thus end up paying them twice: once at the pump, and again on April 15. And we shouldn’t forget which companies stand to profit most from the $1.5 billion a week, along with lives and blood, that our country expends in Iraq.
We’ve endured grandiose federal energy plans before. Wearing a sweater and speaking earnestly, President Jimmy Carter once told the nation that our energy problems were “the moral equivalent of war.” Then he proposed ripping up a fair portion of this part of the nation to develop oil shale, along with the authority to ignore state laws to construct immense coal-gasification plants.
Under Carter, gasoline was allocated so that it was cheaper in Salida than Denver – it was summer, and the system was based on consumption at the same time the previous year. On account of high gas prices, tourism was down here, but the gas kept coming, so prices dropped to encourage us to consume more here. Smart way to save energy, right?
Ronald Reagan sensibly got rid of most of that nonsense after taking office in 1981. George Bush the Elder never got around to a big energy policy, and the Clinton administration by and large followed the Reagan course: Let the market sort things out.
One particularly stupid part of the new energy bill is the extension of daylight-saving time to start in March and end in November. The idea behind DST is to take away an hour of sunlight in the morning and replace it with an hour in the evening, when you can use the hour for gardening, strolling, tossing horseshoes or other pleasures.
But does it save energy? In theory, you’ll have fewer lights on in the house if the sun is shining outside after you get home from work. But by the same reckoning, you’ll have more lights on if it’s dark when you get up in the morning and get ready to go to work or school.
As for driving to and from work, you will get slightly better gas mileage if your headlights are off, since the engine has to burn a little more gasoline to turn the alternator to generate the electricity for the lights. But if you have to use the headlights in the morning, rather than the evening, where’s the savings?
DST assumes that most Americans operate on the same schedule, and that might have made sense 50 or 75 years ago. But it’s not that way now; this is a 24/7 world. The always-open convenience store down the street is not going to cut its consumption by a single kilowatt-hour on account of DST, and neither is your refrigerator, which typically uses about 14 percent of your household power.
Your computer is going to consume the same amount of electricity, as will the routers and servers of the Internet, and most office buildings are designed so that sunshine is a glaring nuisance rather than a source of light.
In other words, it would make a lot more sense to encourage the use of more efficient light bulbs, refrigerators, computers and the like, rather than extend DST to reduce energy consumption.
Besides, we’ve tried this before, and it went over like a vegetarian cook at a hunting camp. Back in 1974, during the first energy crisis, the United States started on year-round daylight-saving time. Schoolchildren went to their bus stops in the January dark, and the number of morning bus accidents rose. Concerned about the safety of their children walking in the dark, some parents drove them to school – which isn’t exactly a way to save energy. Some schools adjusted their hours, thereby negating whatever energy-saving effect that DST was supposed to provide.
Congress responded quickly then and got rid of extended DST. It didn’t work then, and it’s even less likely to work now. States can exempt themselves from DST – Arizona, for instance, is on Mountain Standard Time all year – and if Congress keeps tinkering with our clocks for no good reason, then we ought to try that, rather than participate in some scheme that endangers people without saving energy.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
