Daylight saving time reduces pollution

The argument

The environmental case for daylight saving time runs through energy. Shifting the clock moves an hour of daylight into the part of the day when people are awake and active, so less of that activity takes place after dark and the demand darkness creates — for lighting above all — falls accordingly. Lower energy usage means less of the generation that supplies it, and because generation is where the emissions come from, reduced consumption translates into reduced pollution. The link from there to climate is the one that matters. Pollution of this kind is among the principal drivers of climate change, so a measure that lowers it aids the world's fight against it. The contribution is made without asking anyone to change what they do: no behaviour has to be given up, no technology has to be adopted, and no cost falls on households, because the only thing that changes is what the clock says. Measures that work by being applied to the calendar rather than to people are rare, and cheap by comparison with almost everything else in the field. Proponents of this position are candid about the scale. Daylight Saving Time causes only a small dent in the crisis of climate change, and nobody presents it as a solution. But the smallness is not a reason to discard it. Climate change will not be addressed by any single measure; it will be addressed, if at all, by the accumulation of many partial ones, and a policy already in place that delivers a reduction at essentially no cost is exactly the kind of measure such an accumulation is made of. In a battle for the world, every dent counts — which is why, on this reasoning, we should have daylight saving time.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The amount of pollution that is actually reduced as a result of Daylight Saving Time is basically negligible. While it reduces energy usage, and therefore, pollution, it also increases other means of negative impacts on the climate (specifically petroleum consumption).

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Even though Daylight Saving Time reduces pollution from energy usage, it actually increases pollution from petroleum usage, making the apparent benefits of the concept insignificant.