On daylight saving, California lawmakers managed to make the U.S. Senate look efficient

Manipulating time itself must hold particular appeal for a body that moves as glacially as the U.S. Senate, which startled Americans this week by voting unanimously to make daylight saving time permanent. It was a bracing development for California lawmakers, who have dawdled so long and uselessly over the matter as to be outpaced by a legislative body that is infamous for inaction.

In the wake of the latest pointless, irritating and in some respects dangerous semiannual clock change, ending the ritual suddenly became a matter of greater consensus in Washington than the global pandemic or the war in Europe. If the House and President Joe Biden concur, the bill passed by the Senate would end fall and winter clock changes by making daylight saving time year-round. Eighteen states have voted to adopt such a schedule but can’t without federal permission.

States may already opt out of daylight saving entirely and remain on standard time year-round — and, according to all the available evidence, probably should. But only two, Arizona and Hawaii, do so.

And then there’s California, whose Legislature has the distinction of having killed measures to institute both year-round standard and permanent daylight time. Worse, lawmakers persisted in their paralysis even after putting the question to voters, who overwhelmingly agreed — as do most Americans — that we should stop wasting our time changing the clocks.

Popularized by bellicose Germans trying to seize military advantage, daylight saving was supposed to save energy by making better use of the sun. But the evidence that it achieves that goal is questionable at best. Meanwhile, research suggests the mass sleep disruption caused by regular time changes, particularly in the spring, has an array of repercussions, from rotten moods and volatile markets to heart attacks and car crashes.

Sticking to one time would be better, as the American Academy of Sleep Medicine has noted. And because year-round daylight saving could entail “perpetual discrepancy between the innate biological clock and the extrinsic environmental clock,” standard time would be best. Real-world experience with year-round daylight saving, including in the United States during the 1970s oil shocks, proved unpleasant partly because of dark winter mornings. Since daylight saving is a failed experiment, scrapping it altogether makes more sense than going all in on the mistake.

In any case, if the Senate measure becomes law, the California Legislature will finally have to choose one or the other. It’s about time.