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.
Read: Vox: It’s Time To Rethink Air Conditioning Or Something »