[tz] United States Senate reintroduced Sunshine Protection Act, enabling Permanent DST

[Tim Parenti]

On Fri, 4 Nov 2022 at 18:16, Paul Gilmartin via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> Would that apply throughout the United States, including Hawaii, Puerto
> Rico,
> and Arizona?


My understanding of the "state exemption" provision in the bill would be
that Arizona, Hawaii, and the various territories would — by nature of
having currently "exempted" themselves from the DST provisions of the
Uniform Time Act — get to choose whether to jump ahead or stay put, while
everyone else in the continental US would be obligated to advance their
standard time.

On Fri, 4 Nov 2022 at 21:36, Robert Elz via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> Why did time run out?   Why was the bill proposed in the first place?


Time has "run out", in a sense, because the current (117th) session of
Congress will be drawing to a close on 3 January 2023 and, after tomorrow's
elections, will effectively be in "lame duck" status.  Of course, this bill
was functionally identical to S.670 of the previous (116th) Congress, which
Senator Rubio also introduced in 2019:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/623/text
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/670/text
Similar bills have come up in Congresses past for years, and I have little
doubt that something similar will be proposed in the next one.  So in that
sense, there really is no news here.

But that's because typically, these bills don't make it out of committee.
And there really weren't any indications that it had much of a better
chance this time, which is why it was so surprising when it passed the
Senate, almost unnoticed, by unanimous consent on 15 March 2022.  That's
undoubtedly a big part of what has driven the extra media attention this
time around: It's genuinely the closest any effort to abolish the seasonal
changes has gotten in the US in a long while.  Unfortunately, a decent
chunk of the recent reporting has been confusing — I've seen a handful of
relatively knowledgeable folks who seem to assume that the bill was passed
into law and that the US just "fell back" for the last time, when that is
not in fact the case under current law.

On Mon, 7 Nov 2022 at 11:34, John Marvin via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> So supposedly a majority of people don't want to change back and forth
> every year, but there is a split where one group wants to stick with DST
> year round and the other group wants to stick with Standard Time year
> round.


I suspect that's a major reason these proposals don't tend to gain much
traction.  While Sen Rubio's Florida could certainly economically benefit
from year-round DST, any given zone is large enough that the seasonal
effects and concerns in other places might as well be completely different.

I can't remember where exactly I read it — DST think-pieces are a dime a
dozen this time of year — but I recently saw a stat that around 60% of US
residents favored abolishing the seasonal time change but, of that group,
about half favored year-round daylight time while around one-third favored
year-round standard time, with the rest undecided.  If we believe those
rough numbers, that would yield the following totals, which are
frustratingly pleasing (or, I suppose, pleasingly frustrating):

40% seasonal switches / status quo
30% year-round daylight time
20% year-round standard time
10% year-round something, undecided

Personally, I'd love to see, say, a "longitudinal" study (heh) which
geographically plots public opinion on the three main options here: status
quo, year-round daylight time, or year-round standard time.  While there
may be some border effects, anecdotally, I suspect there might be a bit of
a northwest-to-southeast gradient in general opinion from standard to
daylight time within a given US zone.

--
Tim Parenti
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