PENNSYLVANIA, USA — Daylight Saving Time begins this weekend. Early Sunday morning, we turn the clocks forward one hour, losing an hour of sleep. With that comes the first after 7 p.m. sunset since September.
Our sunrise and sunset times this Saturday are 6:22 a.m. and 6:03 p.m. But on Sunday, the sun does not rise until 7:21 and the sun sets on Sunday at 7:04.
So yes, that means a dark Monday morning commute, but we will see those 6 a.m. sunrises again by the end of April.
Whether you love the time change or hate it, it is likely not going anywhere anytime soon here in Pennsylvania.
Legally, states are allowed to stay on standard time all year round and some do, like parts of Arizona and Hawaii.
However, states are not allowed to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. Pennsylvania lawmakers have urged Congress to change that, and U.S. senators have tried, too.
The Sunshine Protection Act has been proposed by Congress several times since 2018. The bill would make daylight saving time permanent, but every year that it is reintroduced, it does not gain enough momentum to move on.
The bill would need to win a majority vote in both the House and Senate and be signed by the president to be signed into law. So as of this year, there is no move.
If we stayed on Daylight Saving Time all year round this is what our sunrise and sunset times would look like.
Daylight Saving Time means we get 8:40 p.m. sunsets in late June and early July. But if we never went back to Standard Time in November, that would mean by December, the sun would not rise until after 8 a.m., the latest being 8:28 in the morning.
Staying on Daylight Saving Time permanently would also mean no more 4:30 sunsets, even in the middle of winter. The earliest sunset if we stayed on Daylight Saving Time all year round would be in December, at 5:32 p.m.
If we stayed on Standard Time all year round, in June, the sun would rise at 4:30 in the morning and set at 7:40.
We turn the clocks forward one hour on Sunday. We will be on Daylight Saving Time until the Fall. We go back to standard time on November 3rd.