Do not count me as one of those twice-a-year crybabies who gripes and moans about the changes from Daylight Saving Time back to Standard Time, then back to DST … and on and on it goes.

We’ve “fallen back” one more time. The sun will rise an hour earlier on the clocks we’ve all (or many of us) have turned back before we turned in for the night. It’s going to get dark an hour earlier at the end of the day, too.

I don’t object to the back-and-forth like some folks do.

However, I am beginning to wonder whether we ought to just keep it on DST as a hedge against the reason it was made a more-or-less permanent fixture in our lives back in the 1970s.

Do you remember the Arab oil embargo of 1973? We had those long lines at the gasoline service stations. Gas dealers were running out of fuel. The price of fuel spiked to a buck a gallon and we all went apoplectic at the thought.

The government imposed Daylight Saving Time to ensure a way to keep from turning on the lights in our homes. We wanted to save energy that at the time we thought was in short supply. If the sun was shining later in the day, the thought went, we could conserve electricity that in many parts of the country is produced by fossil fuels; that’s the case in the Texas Panhandle, for instance.

Where are we now? The energy crisis has abated more or less. We have plenty of fuel. You know what? It’s not an endless supply. Oil is still a finite resource. I get that the “crisis” as we once knew it has passed. But why not maintain at least a semblance of alertness to the need to conserve what we ought to know won’t last forever?

Given that I have environmentalist tendencies at heart, that is what I would like to see. I won’t bitch about switching back and forth, not even in the spring when we lose that hour’s sleep by turning the clocks ahead for DST.

Finally, we can stop the silly media chatter about whether it’s called “Daylight Savings Time” or “Daylight Saving Time.” Now that annoys — and the pun is fully intended — the daylight out of me.