Daylight Savings, Energy Wasting?

There's an interesting article over at WSJ today, about a study that was done when Indiana recently switched over to DST. The conclusion is that observing daylight savings time costs the people of Indiana an additional 8.6 million dollars a year in electricity costs.

WOW. Now, there's some interesting information in the article, talking about the difference between this study and the studies in the early 1970's being air conditioning, which accounts for why there was an energy savings seen back then, and not so much now. Given that we just extended DST nationally for an extra month (the reason being to save more energy and fight global warming), it's ironic that we appear to be doing the opposite.

Still, the article also observes that there may be other reasons to keep DST:

"There may also be social benefits to daylight-saving time that weren't covered in the research. When the extension of daylight-saving time was proposed by Mr. Markey, he cited studies that noted "less crime, fewer traffic fatalities, more recreation time and increased economic activity" with the extra sunlight in the evening."

The SUN (and global warming)

Ars Technica had an interesting article today, talking a bit about the sun's effect on Global Warming. There are starting to be studies done specifically to that rule out the possibility of solar activity having an effect on global warming.

My honest opinion is that we don't really know if we're seeing global warming, nor do we know why it's happening, if it is. There's just WAY too much money and power tied up in the concept of Global Warming to believe we're getting any real information about it. On one hand, Gore is trumpeting an alarm. On the other hand, he's doing next to nothing about it in his own life, despite having ample funds to drastically lower his personal impact on the environment. On top of that, he's making a ton of cash selling "carbon offsets". When I take those 2 facts into account, I have a hard time believing him. I don't believe what most sales and marketing people say about their products, either, so take that into account too.

There are lots of good reasons to do "the right thing" where the environment is concerned, I just don't think that a panic inspired by "The Brothers and Sisters of The Church of Global Warming" is one of them.

And yes, I'm the guy that, at every bookstore he goes in, moves all the copies of "An Inconvenient Truth" to the "Religion and Spirituality" section. I'll post the pictures sometime ;)