Probably not many of us voluntarily and willingly turned off the AC and opened the windows, or took midday siestas, or spent part of the afternoons running through the garden hoses. Which is how I remember spending many a San Antonio, Tx afternoon as a kid. Naps and sprinklers, no AC. Of course, that was a long time ago, way before universal air conditioning, and also long before this year where the first six months have already been called the hottest on record.
Europe also has suffered from record-breaking heat during the past week, and much of Europe still lives in truly old buildings, or the pre-1950's condition of highrise buildings without AC. Everyone remembers what happened three years ago in European cities during another record heat-wave and city officials are hoping to avert another such tragedy.
We've written a lot in this blog about global warming, or global climate change, sourced a lot of good links to information about the causes, and even some possible small solutions. In this hot week I have just finished reading a two-part series of articles from Alternet.org on the subject of air conditioning. We think about automobiles, and the heating of our homes and other buildings, when we think of the causes of the atmospheric conditions that are leading us further and further into this global catastrophe. But Stan Cox has devoted a lot of thought to the role that air conditioning has played. And it is not minor.
...the high standard that's been set for passenger comfort is helping doom efforts to run cars and trucks on alternative fuels. In 2005, air-conditioners in U.S. vehicles burned up the equivalent of the nation's entire fuel-ethanol production -- twice.
AC in the vehicles we drive, the homes and apartments we live in, the buildings where we work, the stadiums where we watch sporting events, the malls where we shop, the movie complexes where we retreat on a sweltering summer afternoon to escape the humidity...summer is now an unthinkable concept without the fact of air conditioning. However:
If the United States is going to get serious about the deep cuts in energy consumption that are needed, the whole idea of air-conditioning has to be questioned. In doing that, we can't depend only on ourselves, as individuals, to resist that most physically seductive of technologies. It will require big shifts in public policies that affect economic growth,
The first article is Air-Conditioning: Our Cross to Bear, and it goes places you might not have imagined. It goes way beyond comfort zones, delving into the economics of AC, and our consumer society. The second article is even scarier, as it explores the political consequences of AC. Yes, we may even be able to blame our current Congress and administration on the fact of AC and the Sun Belt growth it enabled. America's Air-Conditioned Nightmare:
Seats in the House of Representatives and electoral votes in presidential elections are re-allocated after each decade's census according to the relative populations of the states. In 1950, the 14 New England and Rust Belt states were apportioned 197 members in the House of Representatives, while the 13 Sun Belt states had only 96. Fifty years later, the northern states' membership had dwindled to 147, and that of the southern group had swelled to 132.
That net gain of 86 House seats by the Sun Belt over the more liberal group of northern states has had profound consequences. Of those northern states' current 175 seats in Congress (including both the House and Senate), 83 belong to Republicans, 90 to Democrats, and 2 to independents who vote mostly with the Democrats. The 13 Sun Belt states are represented by 106 Republicans and only 50 Democrats.
The effect of southbound migration on presidential politics has been even more dramatic. Each state gets as many votes in the Electoral College as it has votes in Congress. In 2004, the New England/Rust Belt states went 144-31 for Kerry (or 164-11 if you're not willing to concede Ohio's 20 votes to Bush), while the Sun Belt states went 156-0 for Bush.
These are two fine pieces that provide a large hunk of food for thought. Last summer, in the atrociously humid heat of Sussex County, in southern Delaware, we undertook an experiment. We turned off our air-conditioning for the entire summer. I think I hadn't sweat as much in all the previous years of my life as I did last summer. We used ceiling fans, window fans, garden hoses (yep, back to the solution I remember from being six years old - and it's still fun), and holding a lot stiller than we normally would.
The college where I taught was one of those contemporary buildings built to be only artificially cooled and heated. It seemed impossible ever to regulate the temperature in the classrooms, so teaching summer school meant wearing a wool shawl (and a shortsleeve cotton blouse in winter) in order not to freeze. Mr. Cox tells us that we may, sooner than we think, and in the increasingly hot summers to come, all be living the experiment my household undertook in the summer of 2005.
Luxuries like comfort air-conditioning are affordable only in a make-believe world with unlimited fossil fuel reserves and a method for pumping carbon dioxide into outer space (or unlimited tolerance for nuclear disaster and storage for radioactive wastes). In a greenhouse future, we will need every kilowatt we can squeeze out of wind machines, solar arrays, and biomass just to fulfill essential needs. None will be left over for cooling down the Astrodome.
If it now seems absurd to suggest that Americans give up air-conditioning, it's because we've become too used to living in the land of plenty.In her history "Air Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900-1960," Gail Cooper tells how the U.S. government's War Production Board in May 1942 banned the manufacture or installation of air-conditioning systems "solely for personal comfort." Plans were even drawn up to remove the few existing comfort air-conditioning systems from commercial and government building for use in military production facilities.
The end of World War II and the economic boom of the 1950s brought a reversal of attitude that is still with us today. Cooper quotes one industry executive of the time who announced, "The problem has been one of selling the public on the idea that air-conditioning is no longer a luxury." But, says Cooper, that idea didn't require much selling: "Architects, builders and bankers accepted air-conditioning first, and consumers were faced with a fait accompli that they had merely to ratify.
If air-conditioning could be banned by the United States in wartime and then be declared a necessity in a time of abundance, we need not regard it as inevitable today. In an era when air-conditioning systems are proliferating, heating up the planet and chilling the social and political climate, their most important feature has become the "off" switch.
