Daylight Saving Time … forever?
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2022
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, a sleepy Senate voted unanimously to end “spring forward” and “fall back” and make daylight saving time permanent.
Read more:
The Senate surprised everyone in Washington this week by voting unanimously to end clock-switching in the United States and make daylight saving time permanent. Our health policy and politics reporter Dan Diamond got to take a break from covering the coronavirus to talk about the bipartisan legislation, which would need to get through the House and be signed by President Biden to become law. While there’s broad agreement among sleep experts that the country should abandon its twice yearly, seasonal-time changes, many sleep experts think standard time is better for our circadian rhythms.
Check out how permanent daylight saving time would change sunrise and sunset times across the United States. Brighter winter evenings would come at the expense of darker mornings.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So, did how did why are you the one who's covering this drama over daylight saving time? |
| 0:07.1 | I mean, you're a health reporter. |
| 0:08.8 | Is this a health issue? |
| 0:10.4 | Well, Martin, I would argue that it is an important health issue that affects all of us, |
| 0:14.6 | but in truth, I also begged for this story. |
| 0:22.1 | That Stan Diamond, he's a health reporter for the post. |
| 0:26.4 | There was a hearing on Capitol Hill about a week ago where the house was going to listen |
| 0:31.5 | to experts talk about daylight saving time and whether we should change it. |
| 0:34.6 | Today, we will be holding a hearing entitled changing time. |
| 0:41.7 | Revisiting spring forward, fall backward. |
| 0:50.2 | And even though I'd been covering COVID and working on the Ukraine crisis, I mean, honestly, |
| 0:54.3 | partly because of that. |
| 0:55.3 | I just wanted one day of, and part of the pun, sunshine. |
| 0:59.7 | And while there are certainly many topics that deserve our attention in this subcommittee, |
| 1:05.1 | today's topic comes just a few days before we once again go through the ritual. |
| 1:10.3 | Many of us don't understand or care for. |
| 1:14.5 | So I ended up on the daylight saving time beat, which is now jockeying among other things |
| 1:19.4 | as something that Congress might actually make a new policy of. |
| 1:24.8 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. |
| 1:28.1 | I'm Martin Powers. |
| 1:29.9 | It's Friday, March 18th. |
| 1:32.0 | Today, we're talking about the Sunshine Protection Act, this bill under serious consideration |
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