The United States is closer than ever to saying goodbye to daylight saving time. Starting Nov. 5, many Americans will have to make changes to their clocks to adjust to the expensive winter weather, setting their bills back an hour. However, some states in the country are not required to do so. Find out here what they are and the reasons that led to such a controversial decision.
States that do not change over time
There are calls across the country to end the practice of changing the time twice a year, in the United States on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November. 19 states have introduced legislation to eliminate the biennial renewal, but the final authority to make such an important decision has been reserved for the Department of Transportation, at least since 1966.
The only parts of the US without daylight saving time are some regions of Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa.
Arizona flirted with implementing the change beginning in 1918, but decided to permanently exclude daylight saving time in 1968. Although the state observes standard time, the Navajo Nation, a Native American territory in northeast of the state, which also crosses New Mexico and Utah Makes the time change twice a year.
Hawaii is the only other state that does not currently observe daylight saving or winter time along with other US Pacific territories and Puerto Rico. Since they are so close to the equator that there is no significant difference in sunrise and sunset times throughout the year, the island’s authorities determined that there would be no benefit to the time change.
Why do we change the clocks to winter time?
The first person credited with the idea of ​​changing our clocks to take advantage of the longer summer days was Benjamin Franklin while he was living in Paris. But the man credited with starting the initiative is a British builder named William Willett, who proposed the idea to Parliament as a way for the country as a whole to use better sunlight.
However, Germany was the first to implement the practice of weather changes, desperate to save energy during the First World War. The policy quickly became popular and most European countries, the US and the UK, along with their allies, adopted daylight saving time in 1918. However, many countries abandoned the system in the post-war years. only to adopt it again when necessary. energy saving.
