April 22, 2005 in Nation/World

Daylight saving may go up

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WASHINGTON – When people go through the ritual of moving their clocks forward each spring ushering in daylight-saving time, they’re also saving energy – the equivalent of thousands of barrels of oil, in fact.

Congress says a good thing can be made better.

Lawmakers came together Thursday to extend daylight-saving time by two months.

The House, in approving a massive energy bill that covers more than 1,000 pages, would extend daylight saving to the first Sunday in March and to the last Sunday in November. It now starts in early April and ends in late October.

The Senate must agree – and it is likely to do so.

“We all just feel sunnier after we set the clocks ahead,” said Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who along with Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., got the measure into the energy bill.

Upton said extending daylight time “makes sense especially with skyrocketing energy costs” even though farmers for years have not been happy about daylight time. They complain the later daylight in the morning affects livestock and makes it hard to tend crops.

And, according to Upton, the energy benefits are staggering.

Citing Transportation Department figures, he said the additional two months could save the equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil each day, or 1 percent of the nation’s total energy consumption.

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