Europe goes into daylight saving time despite controversy – DW – 03/30/2025
www.dw.com
Most Europeans woke up on Sunday clocks that jumped forward by one hour. The twice-annual time change has long been contentious and was even voted against in an EU open consultation back in 2018.

Summary

Most European countries moved clocks forward one hour on Sunday, marking the start of daylight saving time (DST), a practice increasingly criticized.

Originally introduced during World War I to conserve energy, DST returned during the 1970s oil crisis and now shifts Central European Time to Central European Summer Time.

Despite a 2018 EU consultation where 84% of nearly 4 million respondents supported abolishing DST, implementation stalled due to member state disagreement.

Poland, currently holding the EU presidency, plans informal consultations to revisit the issue amid broader geopolitical priorities.

  • rockerface 🇺🇦@lemm.eeEnglish
    720·
    3 days ago

    While we’re at it, cancel the time zones. I have no fucking clue why we’re still pretending everyone wakes up at the same time of the day all over the world. All it does is mess up scheduling for when you actually want to talk to people on the other side of the world.

    • AdamEatsAss@lemmy.worldEnglish
      161·
      3 days ago

      How would we decide to handle the date with no time zones? Half the world would have a date switch during the daytime. Not necessarily impossible to navigate but it would be confusing for a while.

      • rockerface 🇺🇦@lemm.eeEnglish
        44·
        3 days ago

        That is up to the people to decide. Have the date switch at 00:00 whenever that is, or switch it at whatever time is the middle of the night - I just want to be able to see the time written out and be able to tell how many hours from now that’s happening without googling what flavor of time fuckery any specific time zone abbreviation means. I don’t think changing dates is going to be more confusing than some countries having 15 minutes ahead of GMT time zones or screwing up everyone’s circadian rhythms twice a year.

        • nolefan33@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          111·
          3 days ago

          That’s going to be way worse. I can get down with no timezones, but if we replace time zones with date zones you’ll end up with two locations where the same instant of time is either March 2nd at 3am or March 1st at 3am. There really just isn’t an easy way to handle time that works for all weird geographies and also makes it easy to schedule things across an ocean. But also, fuck daylight savings, that’s a totally unnecessary way of making it all worse than it needs to be.

          • rockerface 🇺🇦@lemm.eeEnglish
            5·
            3 days ago

            I don’t mind just changing the date a 0 hours everywhere at once, personally. Though, there’s also a thing Japan already does where they list time at 25:00, 26:00 and so on - meaning 1 AM, 2 AM, but tomorrow. I think that might be handy for when you want to list the time that would technically be tomorrow but still during the current daylight period.

          • Azzu@lemm.eeEnglish
            4·
            3 days ago

            But… That’s already the case even with timezones… There already is an international date line where one side is a day off the other.

            • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
              31·
              3 days ago

              Imagine going to work and writing March 31st on documents all morning, and April 1st all afternoon.

              You might remember that you have an appointment on the 5th. But, when you wake up on the 5th, you’ve already missed it.