Daylight Saving Time, Explained: California Voted for Year-Round DST. Why Do We Still Set Back the Clock?

What is the nature of time? That sounds like a question best contemplated by dorm-room stoners, but the answer affects our lives daily—especially on the two days per year when Americans, and people in 70 countries around the world, engage in the strange practice of shifting time itself by one hour. Time goes forward in the springtime, and back an hour in the autumn months.

Named “daylight saving time,” this practice dates back to 1918 in the United States. A century later, California’s voters passed a ballot measure, Proposition 7, to get rid of the clock change altogether.

Named “daylight saving time,” this practice dates back to 1918 in the United States. A century later, California’s voters passed a ballot measure, Proposition 7, to get rid of the clock change altogether. Carried by about 20 percentage points, 60-40, the 2018 measure authorized the state legislature to abolish the twice-annual time shift.

Yet in 2021, California, like all but two other states, is still switching over to daylight saving time every March, then back to standard time in November. Arizona and Hawaii are the exceptions, both for good reasons. In Arizona the legislature decided in 1968 that the days there were hot enough without adding an extra hour of glaring desert sun. As for Hawaii, the 50th state is located so near to the equator that each day is basically the same length at any time of year.

Why has California, despite the will of the voters, stuck with daylight saving time? Not to mention the other 18 states that also voted to abolish the time change but now keep it anyway. To understand why, we have to travel back in time, as it were, to the beginnings of this odd notion that time should be moved around twice every year.

Nothing ‘Standard’ About ‘Standard Time’ Until 1918

On Jan. 1, 1918, the Calder Act (named for its author, Republican New York Senator William Calder) took effect, after its passage by Congress the previous June.

When railroads suddenly made it possible for Americans to traverse hundreds of miles in a matter of hours, the disparities in time between destinations became unwieldy, and railroads simply could not set reliable schedules. 

Known as the Standard Time Act, it established as federal law the division of the continental U.S. into four time zones—zones that were established in 1883 by the country’s railroad executives, who needed to set schedules that everyone could easily follow. Prior to 1883, the country had no time zones. Each city or town set its own clocks based more or less on the position of the sun in the sky. The U.S. had more than 300 different local times.

This anarchic approach to time worked just fine in an era when transportation was by wagon, horseback or on foot. By the time travelers arrived at a new destination, the precise time when they departed hardly mattered.

When railroads suddenly made it possible for Americans to traverse hundreds of miles in a matter of hours, the disparities in time between destinations became unwieldy, and railroads simply could not set reliable schedules. But in 1878, a Canadian-Scottish inventor and engineer named Sir Sanford Fleming brainstormed the idea of standardizing time worldwide. His plan carved the planet in 24 equal “time zones,” each deviating by one additional hour from the time at zero degrees longitude.

Because the zero longitude line cut through the town of Greenwich, England, Fleming called the time there “Greenwich Mean Time.” That standard, GMT for short, remains the worldwide “mean” time today, though there are now 38 time zones around the world, many of which vary from GMT by 30 minutes, or some other figure, rather than a single hour.

The American railroad industry put Fleming’s time scheme into practice five years later, and the federal government made it official with the Calder Act.

World War I Leads To First Daylight Saving Time Law

But the law also contained another provision, in response to the country’s entry into what was later known as World War I. That provision was daylight saving time, supposedly designed to save fuel and energy by creating an “extra” hour of daylight before the sun went down each evening. Germany had been the first to try the clock-shift as a wartime measure in 1916. Several other countries embroiled in the “Great War” liked the idea and did the same.

Daylight saving time was not widely popular in the U.S., however, where farmers did not take well to losing an hour of daylight in the morning. In 1919, the daylight saving time provision of the 1918 standard time law was repealed.

That didn’t stop individual municipalities from putting their own versions of daylight saving time in place. Nationwide DST returned in February of 1942, under the new nomenclature of “War Time,” but was once again repealed when World War II came to a close—again throwing the US into the insane situation under which varying daylight saving times were sprinkled throughout the country. One national media outlet called it a “chaos of clocks.”

California Passes Its Own Daylight Saving Time Law

California voters either got ahead of the game or contributed to the chaos, depending on one’s point of view, by passing Proposition 12 in 1949. The ballot initiative established daylight saving time in the state, starting on the final Sunday in April and ending on the last Sunday of September. The state law was superseded in 1966, however, when Congress finally ended the “chaos of clocks,” passing the Uniform Time Act. The law set a nationwide standard for daylight saving time, adding a month to the California period.

Under federal law, states may not adopt year-round daylight saving time, which appears to be the preference in California. That would explain why the legislature has taken no action.

The 1966 law, however, failed to mandate adoption of daylight saving time, which is how Hawaii and Arizona were allowed to opt out. And after three different extensions, daylight saving time now lasts almost eight months, making it in effect the new “standard” time. States that opt out, however, are required under the law to stay on standard time year-round.

Nonetheless, under federal law, states may not adopt year-round daylight saving time, which appears to be the preference in California. That would explain why the legislature has taken no action. Even if the state voted to go on permanent DST, the U.S. Congress would need to pass its own law allowing states to do so.

A bill currently stagnating in Congress since 2018, the Sunshine Protection Act—sponsored by Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, with support from Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey and two other Dem senators—would wipe out the twice-annual time change and make daylight saving a year-round standard. Rubio reintroduced the bill in March of 2021, but as the year came to a close the legislation remained in purgatory.

The Real Forces Behind ‘Spring Forward, Fall Back’

The original 1918 rationale for creating daylight savings time, to save energy, appears to have been debunked. The theory received its first real test during the U.S. energy crisis of the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon signed the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Act, which mandated nearly 16 months of uninterrupted daylight saving time.

“What we don't tend to know as Americans is that the biggest lobby on behalf of daylight saving since 1915 in this country—and to this very day—is the Chamber of Commerce.”

MICHAEL DOWNING, AUTHOR, SPRING FORWARD: THE ANNUAL MADNESS OF DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME

The American people just got sick of it, however, and the law was scrapped after less than 11 months. Clocks reverted to standard time on October 27 of 1974. After the premature end to the experiment, the U.S. Department of Energy did a study and found that overall electricity use dropped by all of 1 percent, according to a Scientific American report. A later study in 2006 found that in Indiana daylight saving time actually increased residential electricity use by 1 percent, at a cost of $9 million. Decreases in household lighting were more than offset by the demand for additional air conditioning during the summer months as the sun stayed out longer into the evening.

Another study in 2008, this one covering the entire country, found that adding four weeks of daylight saving time did, in fact, decrease energy consumption—including commercial and well as residential use—by only 0.5 percent, according to the Scientific American report.

Who is in favor of daylight saving time, then? According to Michael Downing, a Tufts University professor and author of the 2005 book Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, the real masterminds behind daylight saving time are business interests.

“What we don't tend to know as Americans is that the biggest lobby on behalf of daylight saving since 1915 in this country—and to this very day—is the Chamber of Commerce,” Downing said in a 2015 video. (Downing passed away due to cancer in February of 2021.) “They understood something very early on. If you give workers daylight, when they leave their jobs, they are much more apt to stop and shop on their way home.”

Recreational industries have also been ardent backers of daylight saving time, according to Downing’s reporting. The golf industry claimed that DST was worth $200 million in additional revenue per year, while the industrial forces behind barbecuing estimate their annual daylight saving payout at $100 million, according to Downing.