
How Bad Is Your Air-Conditioner for the Planet? - tysone
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/science/air-conditioner-global-warming.html
======
kbenson
> As of 2009, nearly 90 percent of American homes have air-conditioners, and
> use about 6 percent of all the country’s energy.

 _Home_ energy use. Since home energy use counts for ~23% of US usage[1],
that's about 1.4% of total usage. Quite a bit for a single segment of
residential use, but not as crazy at 6% might make it sound if you assumed it
was for total use.

> And once developers could rely on heating and cooling technologies, they
> often built less energy-efficient homes, which means that you have to use
> more air-conditioning or heating to get to the temperature you want.

We've just covered that air conditioners use a lot of power. That costs money.
When I bought my house, a a selling point was the extra insulation that helped
keep it a stable temperature, so less air conditioning was needed to keep it
comfortable, yielding savings in the power bill. I'm sure some builders
skimped, but I doubt it had much to do with air conditioning, and more to do
with it just being cheap housing. I would be interested in seeing some more
concrete evidence regarding air conditioning and development of the US South
and Southwest though. The South at least seems to have been fairly heavily
populated long before its prevalence.

So, really the article boils down to click-bait. Air conditioners are closed
systems (WRT refrigerant) when working correctly, and even better refrigerants
are on the way. They use a lot of power, but that's its own thorny issue, and
we are working on that through renewable energy sources. Beyond that, the
answer to the title is a simple "not very."

1: [http://www.eia.gov/consumption/](http://www.eia.gov/consumption/)

------
benologist
I wonder what the cost is of bad, inefficient or unnecessary code, networking,
ad tech etc running on <insert your # of users> devices...

It was reported a while back Android users could get a 20% boost in battery
life by removing Facebook so for 100s of millions of people a big portion of
their total phone electricity consumption is w/e Facebook felt like doing.
Google probably consume a staggering amount of coal distributed all around the
world too, ad/tracker blocking also enables huge battery and performance gain.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/08/uninstall...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/08/uninstalling-
facebook-app-saves-iphone-battery-life)

