Pirate's Cove

How many times have I mentioned in the If All You See posts (like here and here) about seeing an evil fridge? Some might think I’m kidding. I’m not. There are other posts about the climate cult hating on refrigerators, and now we add

How the Refrigerator Became an Agent of Climate Catastrophe

A couple of years ago, in spring, my wife and I took our dog for a walk near Bantam Lake, in northwestern Connecticut, a few miles from our house. In swampy woods on the lake’s northern shore, we noticed a double row of lichen-spattered concrete pillars, each one four or five feet tall. The rows began at the edge of the water and extended maybe two hundred yards into the trees. Nearby was a narrow canal filled with water and dead leaves, crossed in several places by wooden bridges that looked like shipping pallets. In a rectangular clearing beyond the inland end of the canal, we saw two parallel strips of concrete, hundreds of feet long and more than a hundred feet apart. They made useful walking paths over the mucky ground.

I learned later that we had seen ruins of the Berkshire Ice Company, which ran a harvesting operation on the lake a century ago. Each winter, at that site, Berkshire employed a hundred and forty men, many of whom lived in bunkhouses. They worked from three in the morning until six at night, seven days a week. Teams of horses pulling sleigh-like “scorers” cut grid lines in the ice, and men with long handsaws followed the lines. The ice, to judge from old photographs, was more than a foot thick. The concrete pillars that we saw supported a conveyer belt. It moved freshly cut blocks away from the lake to an immense icehouse, which stood on the concrete footings that we had used as walking paths. The icehouse held sixty thousand tons. Train cars could be loaded from two sides of the building at the same time.

OK….. This reminds me of those cooking instructions, where they have to give you a life story before giving the recipe. Anyhow, this story goes on and on and on, even delving into AC, till we get to

Much of the world’s recent growth in cooling capability has been an adaptive response to global warming. The problem is self-perpetuating, because the electricity that refrigerators and air-conditioners run on is mostly generated by burning fossil fuels. There are other climate impacts. Hydrofluorocarbons—which, for decades, have been the volatile compounds circulating inside most new cooling equipment—were widely adopted as refrigerants because they don’t have the same destructive effect on the Earth’s ozone layer as their immediate predecessors, chlorofluorocarbons. But hydrofluorocarbons are greenhouse gases with hundreds or thousands of times the warming potential of carbon dioxide. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency adopted a rule phasing down their production and use in the United States by eighty-five per cent over the next fifteen years. But vast quantities are still being manufactured. Leakage is a common problem, and not only when old refrigerators and air-conditioners end up at the dump.

This is all your fault!

If increased energy efficiency makes over-all energy consumption go down, as the I.E.A. and the D.O.E. suggest, then why does our warming problem keep getting worse? Defenders of efficiency as a climate strategy argue that the amount of energy our machines use today would be vastly higher if our machines were as inefficient as they were ten or twenty or fifty years ago. But the flaw in that argument is easy to see. If the only refrigerators we could buy now were thirties-era G. E. Monitor Tops, Cumberland Farms wouldn’t have an entire wall filled with chilled soft drinks and drinking water (in minimally recyclable plastic bottles, which themselves would not exist without the efficient refrigerated display cases that keep them cold). Similarly, if the only way to fly from one coast to the other were to hitch a ride with the Wright brothers, you wouldn’t travel to California for Christmas.

Y’all are willing to give this up, right? More story

My wife and I lived in Connecticut without air-conditioning for thirty-seven years. The summers are getting hotter, though, and we’re both in our sixties and therefore more susceptible to heat-related health problems. In December, we installed a modern four-zone air-conditioning system in our house. Because the system is so energy efficient, a consortium that includes the state and two electric utilities covered part of the cost. The transaction encapsulates the main flaw of America’s principal response to climate change: we increased our annual energy consumption by making a luxury addition to our house and got credit for helping to save the world.

Luxury edition. Everyone can afford this, right? And your fridge is evil.