With the annual "spring forward" setting of clocks this weekend, it's natural to wonder about the value of this exercise, dated as it is from the Jimmy Carter era of wearing sweaters, driving 55, and small is beautiful.  We turn our clocks to Daylight Savings Time for the same reason as the other stuff: to save energy.

Because, you see, oil is running out.  Remember peak oil?

According to Investor's Business Daily:

The main reason for imposing daylight saving time has always been that it "saved" energy, since it would stay light an hour longer in the evening. The U.S. extended daylight saving time in 2007, as part of President Bush's woefully misguided energy bill – which also banned traditional incandescent light bulbs – specifically because it was supposed to cut the nation's energy consumption.

You get the idea of how stupid this is – not as bad as the green-energy global-warming juggernaut of the Obama years, but something that costs us all the same and, for that, in need of a good hosing.

IBD's John Merline investigated this further, and the facts he's found about the efficacy of this Jimmy Carter-era convention are a doozy.  Turns out that every year we play this Jimmy Carter charade, energy use rises, industrial accidents from sleep-deprived workers go up, car crashes from weary drivers go up, and judges dish out longer sentences on the miscreants, among other consequences, raising questions about whether this idea was ever good at all.  All of it is a result of Daylight Savings Time, something brought to us by central planners.

There are a lot of other details Merline cites, plus worldwide experiences suggestive of exactly the same result as we see here, along with notice that the trend in many states is to start getting rid of this charade.

It's good reading.  Check it out here.