We Need To Better Make Use Of Daylight

The sun set around 4:50pm today - which is horrible. Just last week it was getting dark closer to 6pm - still not great, but at least tolerable. Then this weekend we turned the clocks back since are moving off Daylight Savings Time (DST) for the next 4 months.

To me one of the under appreciated small joys in life is having daylight extend as far as possible into the evening hours. A few years ago I went on a trip to Alaska in the summer, where it didn't get dark until about 10:30 at night. It was great to be able to enjoy dinner, conversation, and even a campfire outside at night. Every night was full with possibilities, mostly because the long day light that happens that far north during the summer. Compare that to tonight in NYC where it got dark over an hour before I got out of work. I walked home in the dark, and already felt like my night was over, and that I had to just turn in and go to bed after dinner. It's depressing.

We have the power to declare what time it is as a society. Why not make it so that we enjoy the precious sunlight more at night when we are awake instead of waste it in the morning when we are asleep?

I propose that the United States uniformly move to permanent Double DST. This means that year round we will be two hours ahead of 'normal' time. This means that in the 8 month DST period, we will get an extra hour of sunlight at night, and in these awful 4 months of non-DST we will get an extra 2 hours of sunlight at night. Tonight the sun would have set at 6:50pm instead of 4:50pm - and all that we would have to give up is a sunrise at 8:30am (which is still before I wake up) instead of 6:30am.

Under this master plan we will get all the benefits of DST (increased evening sunlight, more economic activity, energy savings, reduced accidents) just magnified! Since it would be year round, we also wouldn't have this weird twice a year time shift, which is annoying and causes confusion.

Who's with me?