I'm willing to bet that many of you reading this were shocked when you woke up this morning, smashed the off button on your bedside alarm clock and strolled to your first class of the week only to find out that there were only 15 minutes left in your early-morning power lecture. A quick look at the time displayed on your cell phone told you that you somehow lost an hour of your life. It inevitably hit you that it was not the drunken debauchery of a Madison weekend that caused this Green Day-esque Basket Case of time manipulation; but rather it was, once again, the beginning of daylight-saving time.

I would like to assume that the majority of our student body is made up of attentive individuals that could foresee such an event, but blame cannot be placed on our tardy, absent-minded classmates. Daylight-saving time, which began March 11, went into effect three weeks earlier than it did last year and than it has in years past.

Few understand the reasoning behind the tradition of daylight-saving time, dismissing it as a complicated scientific process that is, for some reason, necessary for our well-being, and it seems to affect us only to the extent of the loss or gain of an hour of sleep. Well, the rationale behind this year's premature time shift is quite simple: energy conservation. By making the days longer, we are more prone to enjoy the outdoors and more likely to keep our energy-consuming electrical appliances off. Before dismissing this justification as too minute an effect, take notice of a study done by the U.S. Department of Transportation that shows the entire electricity consumed by the country is reduced by 1 percent every day under daylight-saving time. Put simply, it works.

Energy conservation is a huge problem that we must face as a planet, and our politicians deserve credit for adding the provision for a longer daylight-saving time into its Energy Policy Act of 2005 — and for giving us more daylight, I, for one, am sure to enjoy my twice-weekly 7:30 p.m. walk home from class if the sun is still up. This type of legislation stands opposed to most energy policy initiatives that this government has instituted in the past, which tend to immediately "spring forward" but eventually and inevitably "fall back."

I am sure that most people understand the drawbacks of human nature that are exposed by classroom anecdotal examples, such as the prisoners' dilemma, the tragedy of the commons, and the problem of collective action in general. For those who don't, the lesson is straightforward: A collective group of people acting in rational self-interest leads to obvious sub-optimal outcomes. In the case of energy conservation, the rational person chooses to drive to work instead of taking the bus.

For sure, as humans, we definitely do understand the environmental dangers that we face and the ones, that as Americans, we created; yet it is extremely difficult for us as individuals to resist the extremely rational temptation of free-riding, myself included. We simply do not want to hop on the bus.

Due to this problem, we are at a point in our industrialization where we must rely on innovative governmental action to solve a problem that the citizenry cannot — and refuses — to solve.

While I understand that this may be an upsetting realization, the enactment of the new daylight-saving policy bears hope for the future. It shows us that our government, as it should, can solve problems as we sleep, even if it is through a Monday morning power lecture.

Ben White ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and sociology.