OK, Warmists, you think air conditioning is Bad for ‘climate change’. What are you going to do? Will you give up your own? Have all the people working for Vox done so? How about at their corporate headquarters? How about Excitable Rebecca Lear, who wrote this screed?
It’s time to rethink air conditioning
What if the most American symbol of unsustainable consumption isn’t the automobile, but the air conditioner? In cool indoor spaces, it’s easy to forget that billions of people around the world don’t have cooling — and that air conditioning is worsening the warming that it’s supposed to protect us from.
There are alternatives: We can build public cooling spaces and smarter cities, with fixes like white paint and more greenery. Some experts have hailed heat pump technology as a more efficient option. But as the planet warms and more of its inhabitants have spare income, AC sales are increasing. Ten air conditioners will be sold every second for the next 30 years, according to a United Nations estimate. Access to air conditioning can literally mean life or death for the young, elderly, and those with medical conditions such as compromised immune systems.
The rise of ACs has an enormous cost: Over time, chemicals known as refrigerants leak out of AC units and accelerate climate change.
Yet, weirdly, Warmists keep using them. You know all the Warmist governments are not turning theirs off, nor even turning the temperature up a few degrees.
Eric Dean Wilson, the Brooklyn-based author of the book After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, is skeptical that phasing out these chemicals will be easy. He’s concerned that a form of protection from a warming world should involve swapping out one chemical for another.
He also made a more radical argument that, in the United States and even around the world, a big cultural shift could lead to a more communal idea of cooling, instead of a retreat to our separately cooled homes. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Communal? Let’s take a look at this interview
What I hoped to do with the book was by tracing this history people could consider a radically different way of living, one that doesn’t have to be suffering. It can actually be pleasurable. I think a lot of people are too afraid to even try that because they think they have to give something up. I hope that it can open the door just a little bit for people to really re-contextualize what it means to be comfortable. I think there’s something to be said about making us a bit more comfortable with the discomfort of outside air.
Yeah, have at it, climate cultists. Let’s see you move from the it being popular in theory role to actually practicing this.
Air conditioning has a racist history and present
You cite New York City’s statistics that even though Black residents make up 22 percent of the population, they account for half of all the heat fatalities in the city. What are the ways we see racism play out in the disparities in air conditioning and cooling today?From the very beginning, even before air conditioning’s invention, people who were enslaved in the 18th century were denied any cooling.
Good grief. These people.
And then there’s the wealth disparity that we’re seeing, especially in developing countries: that air conditioning units have become a marker of class and sometimes ethnic divisions, of who can and cannot afford AC. That’s why an approach to cooling justice — ways to make sure that everyone has access — is super crucial because AC has really become a dividing tool.
And how, exactly, does that occur? Especially when Warmists are arguing that AC is bad? Of course they have to put this in terms Marx would have loved.
When you have open asphalt, which often falls in sections of the city with the working poor, you have hotter cities. Planting more trees and green space can lower the urban heat island effect by several degrees. You can also have better-designed buildings, but that’s tricky because you need new materials and lots of money. You can provide heat pumps, but you also need to redesign the building’s air systems. And we also need more access to publicly cooled spaces so that we’re not all, individually, cooling our homes.
Wait, cities are hotter because of localized effects? Perhaps that could account for the majority of reported warming that’s higher than what nature has done. So, of course we have to have some sort of communal place while our homes are sweltering like it’s 1899.
The Great Reset is not a conspiracy thought up by the right.
The Great Reset’s slogan is BUILD BACK BETTER.
Joe Biden’s Slogan during the last election was BUILD BACK BETTER.
HERE IS WHAT THEY PROMISE YOU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5pxhSnDr4U
Wait a second! I’m white, yet I was ‘denied’ air conditioning until I was almost 30, because I was poor!
I grew up poor too and didn’t have A/C until later in life. Same with color TV!
buried in a mountain of paper work is a single paragraph about EMMERGENCY USE AUTHORIZATION. This would particularly affect the COVID-19 vaccines.
The Paragraph says that IF there is NO ALTERNATIVE TO TREATMENT then EMMERGENCY USE AUTHORIZATION MAY BE GRANTED.
NO ALTERNATIVE> Such as Hydroxychlorquin. Such as Ivermechtin. CHEAP GENERIC DRUGS THAT have shown they work.
BUT ELWOOD AND ZACH AND HAIRY AND BIG PHARMA had to run a smear campaign against these drugs as well as anyone who would dare advocate for them,.
WHY?
If they WORKED then there is no multi trillion dollar inperpetuity vaccines and as a result it would take several years to bring them to market safely.
As is being shown all around the world these vaccines are not that effective and we now have a serious endemic disease that doctors are still terrified to treat with drugs that have been proven to work.
SMEAR the messenger. Smear the cure….because we need EUA to make vaccines.
Incidently INDIA just released their version of a DNA based vaccine. Does it work? We will find out.
Randomized, placebo-controlled, double blinded trials with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin have not supported their effectiveness.
We agree with Mr Trump that the vaccines are safe and effective and should be used widely.
jeff,
Name one trial that has been preformed in the clinical setting in which most primary doctors are saying the drugs are good.
Doogie: Name one trial that has been preformed (sic) in the clinical setting in which most primary doctors are saying the drugs are good.
So you mean running a poorly designed, uncontrolled clinical trial?? Actually, all the randomized, placebo-controlled, double blind studies have been performed in clinical settings – i.e., confirmed and symptomatic Covid-19 patients in various stages of the disease. The observational/anecdotal studies “performed” by primary physicians are not scientifically rigorous. The dietary supplement racket depends on these kinds of studies to support their marketing.
Let me give you a scenario: A primary physician prescribed hydroxychloroquine to the 37 Covid patients he saw and ALL 37 recovered, where he would have expected 1 to die. Does that support the claim that HCQ is a cure? Even 200 such studies would not support the claim. Or maybe the doc prescribed ivermectin (12 mg) to every office patient complaining of upper respiratory symptoms (463 patients) and only 11 ended up being hospitalized. Would that justify approval?
Both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are FDA approved drugs for non-Covid indications. Physicians can prescribe them off-label but it is discouraged by the FDA and insurers, and the docs can be held responsible for serious side-effects associated with off-label use.
You as a clinical scientist understand the deficiencies of retrospective studies, where researchers review medical records to see who was treated and how.
As you know, the FDA requires well-designed, prospective, clinical studies (usually two large Phase III trials + a significant safety database) to consider approving a new drug application.
Jeff,
Amazing. You totally distorted my statement and went off rambling on some stupid scenario. Just admit you don’t have a clue. Now, if a primary doctor desires to use HCQ, what is the problem. The drugs are safe. Yet doctors are prevented from obtaining them in Dem controlled states, why?
Jeff,
Forgot, most drugs that we use in CV disease were originally approved for other reasons, but we started using them in other disease states, such as beta blockers. FDA approval was years away and no clinical trials were available. So we assume you are just being an ass, as usual.
Doogie Hoser,
Doctors are permitted to prescribe approved drugs for “off-label” uses, but that doesn’t mean the uses are effective. Each time it’s a human experiment.
Some state Boards of Pharmacy have restricted hydroxychloroquine to approved uses, e.g., lupus treatment. You wouldn’t want lupus sufferers to be deprived of treatment for an unapproved, unsupported use of a drug would you?
Weren’t beta blockers originally developed for CV uses? Professor Black at ICI won a Nobel Prize for inventing propranolol, didn’t he?
Come on, Doogie, just admit you haven’t a clue.
But what if they are effective?
https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/columnists/indias-ivermectin-blackout/article_e3db8f46-f942-11eb-9eea-77d5e2519364.html
#BelieveTheLie
Bwaha! Lolgf
Have a clue,Rimjob. You’re wrong again, dipshit.
https://fcpp.org/2020/11/08/hydroxychloroquine-is-widely-used-around-the-globe/
https://hcqmeta.com/
#BelieveTheLie
Bwaha! Lolgf
Teach, you dipshit, the jig is up, LOL.
And so where’s your rebuttal, Rimjob?
Keep proving to everyone just what a stupid dipshit you are.
Bwaha! Lolgf
Streets can be paved with asphalt, concrete, or cobblestones/brick, and all of them are heat absorbers. Asphalt, being darker, does absorb more heat, but my first reaction, upon reading this was, what, does this guy want to go back to dirt roads?
The reflectivity of roads can be changed with coatings or incorporated aggregates. Untreated asphalt and dirt roads are not the only two choices. Urban roads can also be shaded with vegetation.
Roofs can be made more reflective too.
These three paragraphs contain enough stupidity to glut the market for years to come. I’ll bet the author is an “intellectual”.
BTW, I’m old enough to remember when the term “intellectual” implied that one had an intellect. This is obviously not the case anymore.
Bingo