Upgrading is not always the best answer. This site just finished an upgrade that was started prior to 1.5.3 being released. When we picked it back up I looked at going with 1.5.4 but because some mods were not available and merging changes required was going to be a major undertaking we decided to complete the upgrade to 1.5.1 before we tackled 1.5.4.

Perhaps I haven't made myself clear on what the problem is. I have installed the time zone fix mod (by Gilby) which is available for 1.5.1. Since installing the mod the correct time appears in admin/server info for both the database and server.
Code:
Server OS: Linux 2.6.32-458.23.2.lve1.2.45.el6.x86_64    	Database: MySQL 5.5.41-cll-lve
Server Date: 02/02/2015 13:15:41   	Database Date: 02/02/2015 13:15:41
The tz environment variable indicates that the timezone is set as expected
Code:
Environment Variable	Value
TZ 	America/New_York
The problem is that when looking at the date purchased timestamp on the admin/orders menu it is one hour behind. Looking at the database the times in the order records, customer info, others are all one hour behind even though the correct time is displayed in the admin. The emails sent also contain the wrong time.

I'm trying to understand why even though the timezone seems to be set correctly the database is writing the incorrect time.