Nations are increasingly moving away from daylight saving time and raising questions about the future of clock-switching. These days, it’s tough to get the world to agree on just about anything: From countless military conflicts over strategic territory to trade wars rooted in years-long grievances, consensus in the 21st-century world seems hard to find. Enter daylight saving time. For decades, the arguments in favor of switching clocks twice each year, as is widely done in Europe and North America, centered on maximizing use of natural light to promote economic efficiency. Shifting an hour of sunlight from the morning to the afternoon, when more people use it, simply added up. But when the European Union voted earlier this year to end the practice by 2021, allowing each member state to choose whether it’ll continue to do so on its own, it joined a fast-growing tide against the practice. One by one, countries across the world are increasingly moving away from the habit first introduced in Germany a century ago. |