Is it time to scrap the practice of changing our clocks twice a year?
Posted March 13, 2016 12:45 pm.
Last Updated March 13, 2016 12:46 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – You had to set your clocks ahead an hour this morning, but is it hurting more than helping?
Werner Antweiler with UBC says that hour of lost sleep can hurt the stock market and make workers less productive for a few days. “Even though it may only be a small percentage of the population that is effected by this, if everybody in the economy is going through this change that is [a large amount of people]. We see this as a higher incident of traffic accidents involving injuries and even fatalities.
One argument for springing forward is that it saves energy, especially with lighting. But Antweiler says a Daylight Saving study in Indiana found that’s not the case anymore.
“People actually made that switch; they used more energy for air-conditioning because they were staying up longer essentially while the savings on the lighting were quite minimal. Also, today we are using LED lightbulbs and they are much more energy efficient than the old incandescent light bulbs.”
A separate UBC study found the time-switch leads to a one-day loss of as much as $31-billion across all American stock exchanges.
