The Politics of Daylight Savings Time

Here’s an energy policy trivia question for you. What do you get when you have a Republican control Congress with Texas Republican Tom Delay as House Majority Leader along with two oil men, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in charge of the executive branch? Give up? Here’s a hint. This morning it cost you and most notably your kids an extra hour of sleep a few weeks earlier than normal.

The Energy Policy Act in 2005 extended daylight saving time by four weeks starting in 2007 from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November. The objective, or the hope, was to save 10,000 barrels of oil each day through reduced use of power by businesses during daylight hours.

But what if the amount of energy saved during daylight hours is offset by the increase in usage in the morning hours when depending on where you live it may still be dark outside when the alarm clock goes off? And what about reducing energy cost? The law of supply and demand dictates that reducing oil consumption should reduce oil prices. However, prices can be fixed to remain stable or even increase by OPEC who can simply reduce production in order to artificially increase prices, manipulating the laws of supply and demand to its advantage.

The results of the effectiveness of daylight savings in energy conservation is all over the place. Therefore it is uncertain as to whether or not daylight saving time conserves energy. However what is absolutely certain is the conservation of profits of the big oil industry. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 gave huge tax breaks to American energy companies and corporate polluters, allowed for drilling both off shore and in the Alaskan Wild Life Refuge, and even shielded manufacturers of motor fuels and other persons from liability for claims based on defective product relating to motor vehicle fuel.

Watch as Rep. Fortney Stark (D-CA) voices his opposition to this bill:

Extending daylight savings time was a fuzzy attempt to disguise a deficit spending $14.5 billion tax break to the energy companies while pretending to exact real reform. And with subsequence summers of over $3 a gallon gas prices of 2007 and $4 a gallon gas prices in 2008, daylight savings time wasn’t the only thing making Americans lose sleep during the past few years.

Global Warming: The Miseducation of South Dakotans

The greatness of a nation is measured by the education of its youth. Two primary subject matter by which they are sized up against the rest of the world are math and science. In the past eight years, science has often taken a back seat to the predisposition of the fossil fuel lobbyists, one of the loyal base of the previous Bush administration, in order to minimize the effects of human behavior on climate change. It had gotten so onerous that President Obama saw fit to reinstate science back into its prominent place of greatness and prestige in his inauguration speech:

We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its costs. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.

Apparently South Dakota did not get the memo that the United States is no longer in the business of sullying the waters of the sound science of hypothesis testing and data analysis with the junk science of political ideology and basic instincts. That is because thanks to a resolution passed by the South Dakota House of Representative, students can now be taught a “balanced teaching on climate change”. Specifically, students can now be taught that global warming can also be caused by “astrological, thermological…dynamics”. Dr. Pat Zimmerman, former Chair of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology Atmospheric Science Department, says the legislation brings shame on state of South Dakota:

“These misguided grandstanding efforts exposes the level of ignorance of South Dakota to the rest of the world and it’s an embarrassment,”

Read the entire South Dakota House Resolution (only one page long).

Here is Rachal Maddow’s take on the new legislation:

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Climate Change: The Gotcha Politics of Global Warming

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The record breaking snow fall and cold temperatures in Washington DC and much of the east coast has left a warm and fuzzy feeling inside of the global warming skeptics. In fact we’ve been getting an ear full from this band of conservatives the past few months. In December, at the eve of the climate change conference in Copenhagen, we had Climate Gate where hackers broke into the emails of scientists and claimed to have found proof that data was manipulated to intentionally produce the results that the climate change phenomenon is real. In January we had conservatives up in a frenzy over the supposedly tree hugging propaganda in the epic movie Avatar. And now February has given global warming deniers yet another ah-ha moment – the blizzard of 2010.

The fact that people are confusing today’s weather with long term weather patterns (or climate) would be comical if the consequences were not so serious. Not only is this right wing campaign to minimize the effects of pollution on our planet relieving individuals of the responsibility to reduce their carbon footprints, but it also weakens any chance of getting meaningful legislation passed through Congress to reign in corporate polluters. Watch as Keith Olbermann explains how even Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources committee, although he has a solid environmental friendly record, is buckling under the weight of the cold weather means global warming is a hoax hype and as a result is grounding an important climate change bill:

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To be fair the framers and supporters of the green movement helped in creating an environment where sound science of global warming was casted into the world of doubt and debate. They did this by claiming that record high temperatures or strong frequent huricanes were proof that the earth was overheating. Therefore weather should never have been brought into the discussion of global warming because naturally the flip side to that coin can be exploited by the nay sayers. For example Dr. Robert Book of The Heritage Foundation stated:

So it is with global warming. If there is lower-than-average snow it’s due to global warming (“too warm for snow to form”) and if there is higher-than-average snow it’s due to global warming (“more moisture there, more snow here”), and if snowfall is average, the two cancel out. If northern Europe as a less severe winter, it’s due to global warming making winters less cold; if northern Europe as a more severe winter, it’s due to global warming interfering with the Gulf Stream.

As loathsome and disagreeable as it is, I can see how corporate polluters can decide to hire researchers and think tanks to question the existence of global warming. It is usually in their financial best interest to do so. But what is it with this love affair of rank and file conservatives with cutting off their noses to spite their faces? All of last year they were easily lead to the alter to sacrifice their own self interest by vehemently opposing health care reform so long as it meant running a political hit job on President Obama. They were promised that its failure would be his Waterloo. And now here we go again, sacrificing the health of the planet in exchange for political one-upmanship, this time with Al Gore and the green energy movement in their cross hairs. A divided nation is fertile ground for gotcha politics, logic or reason or sound science be damned. If people are willing to forego their own financial and physical health to score political points, how much more will they be willing to sabotage the environment.

Environment: Six Degrees Could Change the World

With so much to deal with in just your own little world, who has time to think about the environmental issues. It all seems so far fetch, so why don’t we just leave it to the hard core environmentalists. This was my logic – until I saw satellite photos of how the polar ice caps are melting dramatically. Then I saw this:

The Discovery Channel presented a stunning two hour documentary about the effects of global warming and what would happen with a one to six degree temperature increase in the earth’s climate.

WATCH |

You can watch the interactive highlights of the documentary at the National Geographic web site, depicting what can happen with each incrimental degree increase in the climate’s average temperature.