Time for Daylight Savings Time to Go

Congress is back in session. I know lots of folks have big concerns they'd like our best and brightest to address, the war in Iraq, immigration reform and the high cost of video rentals among them.
However, I have an idea that also deserves serious consideration. Twice a year, I feel as though the federal government has done a number on me. No, it doesn't have anything to do with taxes or elections.
What I'm talking about is daylight saving time. When we switch back and forth between daylight saving time and standard time, I can be guaranteed to have my life screwed up twice a year. I tromp around pawing for a cup of coffee to get my eyes open. Things at work are all out of whack, and I'm generally not a happy camper every time the federal government decides to mess up my life.
Look, if someone wants to get up earlier or later, that's fine. Just leave me out of it.
Which brings me to my point. We often hear a lot of hot air coming from Washington, D.C., and elsewhere about how we should save energy. I'm in favor of that, because the more energy I save, the less money I have to ship to Pacific Power, which, not coincidentally, is owned by Warren Buffett, the second-richest guy in the U.S.
So how, exactly, can we do that? The answer is simple — and it will avoid ticking me off twice a year. All we have to do is stay on daylight saving time year around.
By doing that, we use less energy because the sun "sets" an hour later. That means we use lights and other appliances less. That's because about 25 percent of the electricity used in the country is in the evening hours. When we lop off an hour of electrical use each day, we save energy and money.
This is not a radical idea. During the energy crisis in the late 1970s we stayed on daylight saving time. When Enron screwed up California's energy supply a few years ago, that state requested to stay on daylight saving time. Some states don't switch time at all. Hawaii and most of Arizona don't, yet we go through this twice-yearly exercise in frustration and futility for, well I don't really know why. And I doubt anyone in the federal government can explain why we do it, either.
Here's what I suspect. I suspect that the federal government, Congress included, looks at daylight saving time as a twice-a-year wake-up call to show me, you and everyone else who's really in charge. Twice a year, the Washington, D.C., crew gets a chance to send a message to each of us that, no matter what we learned in our eighth-grade civics classes about majority rule and representative democracy, we really do serve the federal government instead of vice versa.
Some years ago, parts of Alaska switched time zones by not switching from daylight saving time to standard time one fall. Some folks thought the world would come to an end when they did that. They were sure the economy would suffer and the world as they knew it would grind to a halt.
And do you know what happened? Nothing, other than the fact that most Alaskans didn't have their sleep patterns ruined that fall.
While Congress is pondering Iraq, immigration and all of those other problems, I have one little request. Please make a simple switch to year-round daylight saving time. It'll save energy, it'll save money and it'll give us more daylight in the evening.
And we'll all sleep better.