Is there another way to do this so that we don't have to keep manually doing the conversions inside all the components?

Just some ideas off the top of my head...
1. What if we wrap the d3 scale in our own wrapper and do this there?
2. What if we just override the formatting functions in the scale to always use [the utc formatter](https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Time-Formatting#wiki-format_utc)?