Dear friends,
I have been complaining about (and confused by) the twice-yearly ritual of changing the clocks ever since I learned to tell time.
We are coming to the end of what one person I love called
my mother’s least favorite week, every year. Tired, cranky people all over!
And no, I’m not quoting my own child talking about me, but I might as well be.
The research to show that changing the clocks contributes to sleep deprivation, automobile crashes, and a jump in strokes and heart attacks has been around for a long time.
Nonetheless, I immediately had questions. I went to work in the dark this week, as I know some of you did, and I was pretty sure the Senate got it backwards. Since I have clung to my confusion —fall forward, spring back (like fainting, and cake baking!) — you are forgiven for distrusting my instincts.
However, a friend, who teaches about solar energy, agrees that it makes more sense to
stick with standard time instead of daylight savings time [because] with standard time, noon is better aligned with solar noon.
Sleep experts concur. According to David Neubauer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences,
With daylight saving time, we are perpetually out of synchronization with our internal clocks and we often achieve less nighttime sleep, both circumstances having negative health impacts. Extra evening light suppresses the melatonin that should be preparing us for falling asleep. The later dawn during daylight saving time deprives our biological clocks of the critical light signal.
I’ve been looking for the climate argument against Daylight Savings Time, because I believe that in a warming world, we are better off with more light at the beginning of the day.
This interesting article about Indiana, which did not standardize the switch to Daylight Savings Time until 2006, suggests that there is a reasoned climate argument for standardizing to standard time.
Up till 2006, only a handful of [Indiana’s] counties pushed their clocks around at all. The vast majority, mostly rural farm communities where daily routines are still largely dictated by sunrise and not an electric clock, stuck stubbornly to standard time year-round.
[When] the entire state standardized their clocks and joined the daylight savings movement, that provided both a bulk of data and a control group.
The results? Instead of saving electricity and money by adding an extra hour of sunlight to evenings most of the year, it cost Indiana homes an extra $8.6 million in electricity bills – mostly from chugging air conditioners – each year.
I’m thinking about an action, targeting House members. But I want to give you some time to help me out with the climate argument and our next moves. If you have access to more recent research, please send it along.
I propose sending Big Oil’s big windfall back to the hardworking people who paid for it at the gas pump. Over the longer term, speeding up the transition to renewables will lower energy costs, insulate consumers from price spikes, and reduce Western nations’ dependence on foreign despots and greedy fossil fuel companies.
I’m repeating this action, because it’s so important AND so easy:
Call on Congress to pass a windfall profits tax on Big Oil profiteers. This 15-second(!) action is from Fossil Free Media (scroll down on the landing page to get to the petition).
When fossil fuel companies profit, they externalize their costs onto what are sometimes called ‘environmental justice communities’. I don’t care for that term.
What the industry is doing is poisoning Black and Brown people who live in neighborhoods that are already poisoned by emissions. This is unacceptable.
It’s time again for whack-a-mole. In the fall, the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation denied a permit to NRG to build a new peaker power plant. NRG appealed, and now we have to whack this mole again.
This action is more of a two-minute action, as I have taken the talking points provided and composed the body of the comment, which you can personalize. For those of us who live in NYC, this is our backyard.
Use this action from No Astoria NRG Fracked Gas Plant to tell the governor and the DEC to uphold the Astoria decision!
Again, I’m going to urge you to take action to get Fair Pay for Home Care passed. I went to a rally outside City Hall on Monday, where Council member Crystal Hudson talked about the resolution she introduced to pass Fair Pay for Home Care.
One of the speakers noted that the best long-term care insurance today is to have a daughter, because millions of women perform countless hours of unpaid labor to keep family members in their homes. I’m not that kind of daughter, but a dear friend moved her mom into her one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment last year, and I think about this every day.
Home care is an issue we can ignore until we can’t ignore it.
Another speaker, council member Carmen De La Rosa, talked about her own mother, who spent 25 years as a home care worker. Her mother was only able to retire with Carmen’s support, because her years of hard work did not enable her to save; the pay is simply too low. Carmen was a co-sponsor of Fair Pay legislation in the Assembly, before she was elected to the council last year.
The Crystal Hudson’s resolution in support of Fair Pay for Home Care passed on Wednesday. We are weighing in, over and over, so that a living wage for care workers becomes a reality.
Take this new 15-second (!) action from NY Caring Majority to contact the governor again (!) to ask her to support Fair Pay for Home Care.
There’s a 35 percent uptick in COVID cases in NYC in the last two weeks. A friend who is generally very careful about their health reported:
I went to a house concert last Friday and 7 people got covid! We were all unmasked.
Please wear masks at indoor gatherings, even if you’re vaccinated and boosted.
with love,
L