Never ending debate... Does daylight saving time help the environment?

05/05 04:46

As the clock strikes midnight on the last Friday of April 2024, Egyptians push the clock forward by 60 minutes, so that the country can resume working according to summer time (daylight saving time) after a hiatus that lasted for more than 7 years.

The official government decision has revived the debate between supporters and opponents of implementing the summer time system, about the advantages and disadvantages of this timing, but what is certain is the futility of any change if people’s habits and lifestyles do not change.

The question here is... Benefits for whom and harms against whose interest?

The answer, of course, is humans, and this may seem logical and legitimate, but what about the interest of the environment in which this human lives, so that it can withstand the depletion of resources and pollution, and accordingly, humans find a suitable place for life so that they can live whether in summer or winter time?

First of all, why does the phenomenon of daylight hours vary during the seasons of the year? It increases in summer and decreases in winter.

Due to the tilt of the Earth's axis by 23.5 degrees, when the Earth revolves around the sun, one of the hemispheres (northern or southern) tilts or approaches toward the sun. Summer comes in this hemisphere, and the day becomes much longer than the night because it enjoys sunlight for a long time, and with rotation it reverses. This situation occurs in the winter.

How did daylight saving time begin and

The idea began in 1784 with the American “Benjamin Franklin” called for individuals to wake up early in order to take advantage of sunlight in the summer, and thus save energy, but it remained an abstract theory and did not come into effect until during World War I, when Germany decided to push the clock forward for the first time in the summer with the aim of saving energy so that it could be used in weapons factories, Britain and many European countries followed suit.

Since that time, daylight saving time has been adopted or canceled according to the needs of each country, especially since the energy crisis in the seventies of the twentieth century, as the major industrialized countries faced a severe shortage of oil, in addition to its high prices, the solution was to reduce energy consumption through the daylight saving system.

The United States adopted daylight saving time in 1966. It begins every year on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November, meaning it lasts 34 weeks, about two-thirds of the year.

In 1996, all European Union countries agreed to alternate between winter and summer time simultaneously in the same period, starting from the last Sunday in March until the last Sunday in October.

With the adoption of daylight saving time in a number of countries around the world, this leads us to the basic question: Is the summer system considered “environmentally sustainable” and saves energy consumption?

The purpose of moving forward the clock is to start work and social life times earlier in order to make optimal use of daylight hours, which gradually increases at the beginning of spring until the peak of summer, and thus the requirements for artificial lighting, heating, industrial production, and of course energy utilization decrease. Also, increasing daylight hours helps reduce traffic and transportation and thus carbon emissions because the pressure is distributed over a greater time during the day.

Daylight saving time in numbers