You asserted that employers would say “yes, you can start an hour earlier” but “no, to start an hour later” which assumes the employer would also say “yes, you can also leave an hour earlier”, or the respective “no, you may not stay an hour later”.
The same logic used to favor starting an hour earlier, disfavors leaving an hour earlier; and favors staying an hour while disfavoring starting an hour later. Who knows what the management security implications are for locking/unlocking the facilities involved, OSHA requirements, manager hours, etc.
I simply disagree you can predict an employer’s likely behavior with any probability confidence on this.
It’s a “both foot” shoe because it’s a zero sum condition.
During Summer on Standard Time Sunrise happens at approximately 4am (sunset at 8pm). By shifting our clocks forward an hour that becomes 5am sunrise instead. So without daylight time, sunrise happens at 4am. It even shows that on the image of the sun position and clock times you’ve posted.
And I misspoke on the sunset thing, I should have said “'sunset at 6pm feels better” as 5pm sunsets are what we have now have during standard time in Winter. Permanent daylight time, moving the clock forward an hour would make that sunset happen at 6pm
The more hours people spend without the sun, the more energy we consume.
This effect is greater in the evening time at sunset over the morning time as most of society wakes up after sunrise (and therefore aren’t consuming excess energy while they are asleep) and they are usually awake past sundown (and the earlier sundown happens, the sooner they start consuming electricity).
Standard Time makes sunset happen earlier on the clock, therefore putting more awake people in the dark for more hours.
I also want to look at how that study was calculated, because it doesn’t say what those percentage increases are in comparison to; the implication is over “standard time”, and the changes are most dramatic at the edges of the calendar period where you would expect it because the clocks are more misaligned during those periods than in summer. What the paragraph is silent about is how much more energy would be consumed in the summer where the daylight clock time to people awake clock time is most mismatched (because sunrise happens at 4am and sunset at 8pm).
Again, as you suggested, we can use whatever clock time we want and alter our schedules to match the clock times appropriate for our situation. We could end timezones entirely and use UTC across the US or even the world and it that doesn’t force anyone to do anything. It’s annoying, but it’s not forcing anyone to do anything.
The actual health problem needing to be addressed is aligning our lifestyles to the sun’s rhythms regardless of what our clocks say far more than trying to figure out the right clock time for sunrise and sunset to happen.
Say we succeeded at abolishing DST and went ST year round, we’d still be left with the same problem that we aren’t aligning our activity schedules with the longer and shorter days (because sunrise would now be happening at 4am during the summer).
