CR – This weekend, on the night from Saturday to Sunday, another time change will take place. We often just turn the imaginary hand forward an hour, so the weekend will be 60 minutes shorter. Such an artificial shortening of the weekend (and its artificial extension in autumn) should have ended three years ago. In 2019, MEPs supported a plan to abolish the mandatory alternation of standard and summer time in 2021. But the EU member states could not agree on what the new “permanent time” should look like, whether it will be today’s “summer” or “winter”. time. And then the discussion was cut short by the covid pandemic.
The cancellation of the time warp should have happened a long time ago. The assumption that alternating saves energy is already wrong in the 21st century. Dozens of scientific articles on the subject agree on one thing: the average energy savings are practically zero. On the contrary, it turns out that in some countries the artificial time shift clearly increases consumption. Despite the fact that the spring time change causes many people not only discomfort, but also health problems that lead to lower work productivity and more frequent heart attacks and traffic accidents. Changing time in this way is proven to kill dozens of people every year. Summertime has more victims than, say, tick-borne encephalitis.
So it’s really high time to stop artificially changing time in Europe, just as dozens of countries around the world have done in recent decades. Of course, not everyone will agree whether to keep the current winter or summer time all year round. Someone will want it to be light longer in the evening, others will want it to dawn earlier.
Our “winter” (that is, true Central European) time is set ideally for a person who goes to bed at eight in the evening and wakes up at four in the morning. Midnight in our true time is the middle of the dark period, so a person with midnight-centered sleep makes the best use of daylight. But honestly, who among us regularly goes to bed at eight o’clock? If a typical Czech goes to bed at ten o’clock and wakes up at six o’clock local time, double summer time, which some countries have already experimented with, would even be ideal for him. Of course, this would mean that the morning would be dark in the winter, but on average over the whole year, the use of daylight would be the best. Anyway, the current system of artificial rotation is the worst possible and we should get rid of it as soon as possible.
Tags: ECONOMIC COMMENT time change coming advantages disadvantages
