ST. GEORGE — The twice yearly ritual of forgetting to change your clocks and showing up to church or work at the wrong time will be here again Sunday morning. Daylight saving time is coming to an end and the nation will be back to standard time for 18 weeks.

Spring forward, fall back

So goes the old familiar saying that allows us to keep track of which way to set our clocks. At 2 a.m. Sunday the clocks fall back one hour. The general consensus is that clocks should be set back before bedtime, so you will wake up at the correct time.

This also means that you will be able to stay in bed for another hour. That is, unless you live in one of the areas that did not spring forward earlier this year, Arizona being one of those places. Arizona residents don’t have to worry about changing their clocks … unless they live in the Navajo Nation.

It’s also a good idea to change the batteries in your smoke detector at the time change.

Economic benefits to daylight saving time

University of British Columbia economist Werner Antweiler recently looked at the economic impact of daylight saving time in an article for the web publication Globalnews.ca. Antweiler said there are plenty of reasons to get rid of it.

One of those reasons, Antweiler said, was that Indiana recently did a study to determine if daylight saving time really did reduce energy use. One study found that there was actually a slight increase in energy demand. While there was a small savings in lighting, a larger increase was seen in air conditioning use on long summer evenings and heating use on fall mornings.

“(T)he costs are substantial,” Quartz columnist Alison Schrager said in a recent article. “Changing time disrupts sleep, causing more heart attacks, strokes, traffic, on-the-job accidents, and lost productivity hours. The whole point of time zones is coordinating economic and social activities, but changing clocks causes confusion. The fact that different countries change their time on different days, and poorer countries don’t at all, makes international business and travel more difficult. The airlines estimate DST costs them $147 million dollars a year.”

Getting rid of daylight saving time

So why don’t we just abolish the idea? Michael Downing, time zone expert and author of “Spring Forward — the Annual Madness of Day Light Saving Time,” said there are two main reasons we don’t get rid of it.

“(It’s) a romance we have with long summer evenings and special interests,” he said. “The pain of early mornings next week are long forgotten when you enjoy a evening barbecue in July.”

Longer nights mean people have more time to shop, Downing said. He also noted how every 20 years the government adds another week or two of daylight saving time, the last change in 2005, in part, because the sugar lobby wanted to extend trick-or-treating hours.

Utah attempted to legislate out daylight saving time in 2015. A bill called Daylight Saving Time Exemption, introduced by Rep. Lee Perry, R-Perry, during the January through March 2015 general legislative session, failed to make it out of the House Rules Committee.

Rep. Fred Cox, R-West Valley City, tried again in October 2015, drafting a bill that would keep Utah on standard time all year. The House Natural Resources Committee rejected House Bill 65, defeating it 8-4.

Arizona (except for the Navajo Nation), Hawaii, Saskatchewan, Quintana Roo on the Yucatan Peninsula and some Amish communities do not observe daylight saving time.

“It’s ridiculous no one knows what time it is,” Downing concluded.

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