Conditioned
Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer)
Stan Cox, The New Press, 2010
The choice of font for the Blair’s Air Conditioning and Heating
company says a lot about what we want. The letters are coated in snow;
we wish, at least initially, to go from one extreme temperature to
another, and may the Floridian that has never had to wear a jacket to an
indoor activity be the first to deny it.
Enjoyment of extremes — which can also be seen at beaches — is just
one of the methods for weaning ourselves off of refrigerated air that
Stan Cox suggests in his book, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer).
As a person from the North of a country in the North of a continent in
the Northern hemisphere, I was, until I moved to St Petersburg, fairly
uninterested in air-conditioning. Being dependent on electricity, I had
imagined that cleaning up its environmental impact would be a simple
matter of changing the energy source, at least compared to improving
heating systems based on natural gas. But air-conditioning is more than
just an ironic indicator of the problems we face in preventing a warming
planet. Cox shows that it has changed our world in ways that are hard
to comprehend.
The following figures are approximate. Air-conditioning now accounts
for a third of electricity use in the U.S. (20% in homes, 13% in the
commercial sector). The same amount of electricity is used for AC today
as for all purposes in 1955. Between 1993 and 2005, the total amount of
energy used for AC doubled. Each American uses as much electricity for
AC as 3 Africans use for all of their needs. We would create as much
pollution if every U.S. household bought an additional vehicle and drove
it around for 7000 miles per year. I cannot bring myself to depress you
with the figures projected for AC’s increasing use as the Earth heats
up.
The direct energy burdens air-conditioning creates are only part of
the story. As Cox points out, “from the desert Southwest to the
Everglades, air-conditioning has played an essential role in drawing
millions of people to some of the country’s most fragile environments.”
It has acted as a bridge between the places humans can naturally thrive
and other glorious forms of destruction. For example, a 2006 report by
the Florida Coastal and Ocean Coalition shows that the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers approves more permits to destroy wetlands in Florida than
any other state, approving 12,000 permits between 1999 and 2003. The
number of applications rejected: one. Gary Mormino of the University of
South Florida is quoted as saying that it is “inconceivable” that 18.5
million people would be in Florida today without AC.
Even without population growth, domestic use of AC would have
exploded. The excesses documented are some of the most infuriating
problems in the book, but they may well prove the easiest to solve. They
include cooling empty winter homes in the summer to protect
possessions, and homeowners associations that ban visible fans or window
air-conditioning units — both less wasteful than centralized air — on
the grounds of aesthetics. More troublesome is the fact that in the last
half of the twentieth century, average housing size doubled and per
occupant floor space tripled. An “efficient” 3000 square foot house uses
far more energy than a leaky 1500 square foot house.
That
other great twentieth century innovation, the car, would also be a much
different beast without artificially cooled air. A typical vehicle in
Hawaii uses 94 gallons of gasoline per year just to run the AC unit; in
Arizona the amount is 76, in Florida, 73. When you add all the numbers
together, the national cost is 7 billion gallons of fuel annually, or
5.5% of the total — a point worth remembering as we hit peak oil. A
habit has developed among some of leaving AC blowing in vehicles whilst
they wait in parking lots for their owners’ return. Wealthy Americans
can now store their pride-and-joy mid-life-crisis indicators in
climate-controlled rooms known as car condos. Cox even ponders whether
AC is responsible for the United States’ wider car culture: “It seems
worth asking whether the working people of America would be in open
revolt by now against the mind-numbing ordeal of ever-lengthening
commutes were it not for air-conditioning” and other mobile comforts and
distractions.
We should be glad that that band of hippies, the U.S. military, is working on expanding its use of renewable energy,
as at present, 85% of the diesel taken into Iraq and Afghanistan is
used to run AC. Air-conditioning may not only have made invasions of
intensely hot countries possible, it may have made them even more
inhumane than they otherwise would have been. Troops in air-conditioned
Humvees rather than open top vehicles can’t easily interact with locals,
adding to the illusion of the war video game. The concern is not so
much hearts and minds as heat and melting.
Air control has affected our health in many ways, including our
ability to cope with extreme heat. But as air-conditioning is often not
just a health issue, but a life or death issue — as the Immokalee farm workers,
living in metal trailers based on oven blueprints, know to their
peril — what is the solution? Among his conclusions, Cox undermines
several prominent lines of thinking that dominate present climate
policy.
The first is that striving for energy efficient appliances is
worthwhile under our current program of perpetual economic growth.
Efficiency at present simply lowers prices for both producers and
consumers of energy and results in higher levels of consumption. The
governments Energy Information Agency, for example, expects a 22%
increase in commercial sector cooling over the next 20 years, even with
improvements in efficiency — the growth of the sector will undo any
technological gains made, and then some. This effect is called rebound,
and it explains why nothing other than a large global recession seems
able to even dent our carbon dioxide output. The only way to slash
emissions sufficiently is to cut overall energy use, and that means
dumping economic growth.
The second myth, which is found all over the political spectrum, is
that we are going to trade our way out of trouble. If there is anybody
left who still can’t see a problem with markets, and that accepts
climate change science, one simple fact devastates their proposed path
to sustainability. Under solely market forces, U.S. renewable energy
generation is expected to quadruple by 2030, but that will only provide
enough energy to power 75% of AC use, let alone anything else. This
again shows that attempting to meet current energy demands rather than
using less of it is unlikely to be enough.
In response to these problems, Cox pads his technological and
efficiency-based tree shades and solar-powered systems in a bed of other
elegant solutions. He shows that when we choose to try and live in
natural temperatures, our bodies participate in regulating our internal
thermometers, and our tolerance grows as a result. Cooling centers could
provide a way to give relief to everyone, whilst bringing us out of the
individual homes that air-conditioning has sent us hiding in to. Tough
truths also have to be accepted and acted upon. Air-conditionings
demands only add to the need to reduce our dependence on the private
vehicle. States like Florida need to restrict the over development that
is ramping up Northern flight and sending them into the Gulf of Mexico
(although the crushing of Amendment 4 by big money this past November 2nd demonstrates how hard this may be). We may simply need to leave some hot areas for good.
Air-conditioning activism provides no excitement for anybody. It
allows us neither the glory of storming the local coal power station or
the feel-good easiness of eco-shopping. It is so boring in fact that I
can barely bring myself to pump up this concluding paragraph. But, as
the rest of the world climbs towards American levels of use, we must
deal with it. Serious work on sustainability sometimes requires
confrontation with drab subjects. The benefits of living with less
artificially cooled air, such as more outdoor activities and more
employee control of comfort in the workplace, will slowly begin to
surface. In the meantime, I can tell you that writing book reviews in
your underwear is a good way of keeping the thermostat turned up.
