Air conditioning has saved countless human lives.[0] It is one of our greatest inventions. I'm not sure this is the intention, but the sentiment expressed in this article, when adopted as policy, puts human lives at risk.[1] There is no iron law that we can either have clean energy or air conditioning, but not both. And as a consequence, there is no iron law saying that environmentalism must be anti-human.
I think there's actually a lot of people who are okay with pushing people into mass starvation and poverty in order to achieve their xyz goals, as long as those people are not them and theirs. Most who think this way will never openly admit it (and that's assuming they actually recognize what their policies will result in). You can see this with the current energy crisis and brewing food crisis (I've seen journalists and others welcome the increase in prices as they believe it will help achieve climate goals).
Might. Not achieving climate goals Might. It's projection, supposition, extrapolation. Very likely true, absolutely, I won't argue that at all, but it's still a Might. We will know if it Did only after the fact.
Right now, though, we know what Does Currently save lives. There is no dispute. Those same things Might also be bad in the future.
To put it more clearly, killing today to save the future is a tough argument.
Demographics nearly everywhere are already trending down. If we're smart about it, we can make it work without destroying all the people on the margins.
Africa is estimated to quadruple its population by the end of the century, reaching 4 Ghab on the already warmest continent. It will take a lot to offset this.
I'm not so sure many believe in Agent Smith's diatribe from the Matrix that humans are a disease, cancer or virus. I think most people adopting this kind of narrative have bought into some Edenic mythology they've bought into about pre-industrial civilization.
Both of these issues...were they brought to you by people who want to stop climate change? Or were they brought to you by the people who do not care about climate change?
Starvation and poverty are being created by the same systems and short sighted thinking that are bringing on climate change. It is a truth that the human population should have never become this large. And how did that happen? With technology and capitalism.
> It is a truth that the human population should have never become this large.
It would be tough to cite exactly how large is too much, and there's a legitimate difference of opinion on whether it's already too late by now.
Regardless of the absolute population size at the time, the real problem seems to be out-of-control growth.
For that there's no citation needed if you're old enough.
Because of the rise in radio, then TV, today's elderly are about the first to have lifetime exposure to world events and developments in real time across the widest number of decades physically possible for our species.
Not everyone gets wiser as they get older, but plenty do and that's a type of wisdom that can not be acquired any other way.
Live long enough with enough attention to these things locally and in communication with a lifetime of first-hand information as well as world-wide media, things which turn out to be fully corroborated in every single way you just eventually can not realistically deny.
The unbridled reproduction of consumers rather than producers for quite some time now seems to be the underlying exponential problem.
And that's not human nature, it's simply expressing the same inhuman nature as all the other living creatures.
According to all sources, always, everywhere, things were better for everyone, when they were less crowded with consumers for which there is not enough being sustainably produced.
If we're not going to end up joining the majority of Earth species that have become extinct, this is one key element where a much more distinctly human touch needs to be completely ingrained in place of natural instinct.
Not surprisingly, out-of-control reproduction is almost like cancer leading to eventual death in a local microcosm and many have been aware of this for millennia.
With nothing but text and oral tradition to preserve these near-prehistoric observations, that may be why so many different ancient cultures have such elaborate taboos regarding reproductive activity.
They do, thanks to capitalism. Bangladesh is a burgeoning export oriented economy. The GDP growth has been a big part of driving down child mortality (how else are you going to pay for vaccines, except being dependent on western charity).
With that same line of thinking we should all find different jobs, as giant data centers and the software industry is far more detrimental to the planet than any amount of air conditioning.
In a hot climate where people overwhelmingly are using residential air conditioning, the power used by the data equipment is dwarfed by the air conditioning needed to keep the electronics from overheating.
Sometimes not even such hot climates.
In an indoor insulated environment all electrical equipment produces heat very efficiently when it runs and its Wattage rating can give you an idea of the maximum heat that might be seen.
Appropriate A/C will be rated to remove the nominal amount of heat, often not needing to handle the absolute maximum.
On the A/C the high amperage refrigerant compressor/condenser unit, which can only do its job outdoors, and the much more economically operated air circulation motor are drawing electricity and producing additional heat of their own, but ideally they are well separated from having their heat enter the indoor space, by proper location, piping, and ducting.
Anyway, the electrical cooling does not work as efficiently as the the electrical heating so you pay more to cool the gear than it costs to run it.
Data centers use so much energy that they need their own enormous AC systems to remove that heat from the building.
Also, have you considered all the labor enabled by AC? Economic development would not be possible in tropical regions without AC, as people simply cannot work effectively in suffocating heat.
Labor != physical work. People still work, just much more efficiency.
Should we all have stayed farmers? Because that's what 97% of everyone used to be before the industrial revolution. I'll take the technical advances, including AC.
You are not following the old truism that the trend is your friend. That AC and capitalism has saved countless lives in the past indicates it likely will in the future. The trend for Malthusian moronicism is just death and suffering. You are arguing counter to both trends so it is you that is likely wrong and it is you that has a very stringent burden of proof for your thinking process.
Prophesies of impending doom and apocalypse are a constant fixture of human civilization, predating capitalism or AC for millennia.
During the last two centuries or so, our prophets mostly switched from religious to ecological topics, but most of their prophesies never come to pass either. Humans are pretty ingenuous when it comes to harm reduction and risk mitigation.
Please do not buy this relentless negativity in full. It will poison your life, and of those around you.
Or we don't believe the in the fear mongering grift whose purpose is to strengthen the dominance hierarchy of the wealthy & politically powerful over everyone else. This grift has & will continue to kill many people.
I always welcome higher prices on things with externalities. Does this make me, and everyone who believes in basic economic theory the baddies?
Surely there is something else that could be done other than subsidizing fossil fuels to make poor people not freeze, boil and/or starve ?
Well, okay that seems like one of the few items that would make it through a government run by and for fossil fuel interests, but in theory at least there are other options that could be explored if we cared about poor people more than just as conduits of cash to the fossil fuel industry.
> Air conditioning has saved countless human lives.[0]
Not necessarily wrong, but it may have also encouraged more people 'than necessary' to live where they "shouldn't". It brings to mind the "Phoenix (Arizona) scene" from the show King of the Hill:
> [looks at car-reported temperature] Bobby: 111F? Phoenix can't really be that hot, can it?
> Bobby: Oh my God, it's like standing on the sun!
> Peggy: This city should not exist. It is a monument to man's arrogance.
I'm in the northeast US and grew up without A/C. My house now has central A/C, but I still think of it as unnecessarily opulent and I feel bad about using it. I keep the setpoint pretty high most of the time, unless someone else comes over to visit and complains. The number of people who just leave their A/C at 70 F and leave it is just staggering to me.
I live in Florida and AC and if I leave the AC off or too high, I'm sweating in my own home.
I'd ofc be thrilled to find an alternative cooling method that works quickly and well in humid climates, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to exist yet (dry heat people apparently have other options tho)
An evap cooler in a dry climate can cool indoors to maybe 20 F lower than outdoors, but when outdoors goes to 100 F, there's not much that can be done by adding water vapor.
I think you’re basically right but there is a distinction in living somewhere hot and building cities in the desert in the American west which require redirecting or fighting over limited water resources.
That was always my thoughts, storage capacity of energy is fairly expensive.
Also there are much cheaper ways to cool than we do today. There are a lot of passive cooling systems. An easy one is to bury pipes a few feet (>3-4ft) under ground and run a fan to push air through the pipes.
You can also put pipes under a near by creek / pond if you have one near by (I have seen this done).
There’s a whole lot of passive systems. Gardens on roofs, sun rooms, underground pipes, water cooled, etc. I’m currently looking at building a house with a combination of these.
The problem with all these is the increased price of construction / inability / unreasonableness to adjust old homes. I do think new buildings should take advantage of some of these. But old builds aren’t really possible to convert.
At least in my country only ~40% of population lives in single family houses. The rest lives in apartaments with no access to the solutions you mentioned.
Also, if you have a single family house, you can just put up solar on the roof, and that will cover AC energy expenditure, all your other energy needs from spring until fall and then have some to give back to the grid.
I can see a concern about neighbours, but a concern about the outside doesn't make much sense to me. If the house wasn't there all of that heat would be going outside anyway.
Solar is a luxury, it requires a substantial amount of real estate and a clear view of the sky. Both of which are incompatible with dense urban areas and shared spaces.
You don't need any real estate aside from your own roof access. That covers 40% of population in my home country (Poland).
Also, the financing is so easy that you don't need access to much capital even - if you live in a single family house and you can afford electricity then you can afford solar.
This is a strawman argument. Air conditioning doesn't need to be used at the current levels it is being used to save exactly the same number of lives. So many people and businesses set the thermostat to the 60s. Even a setting in the 70s is totally unnecessary. Few people, if any, will die if the temperature is in the 80s or even 90s, and people could be honest about making such circumstantial choices.
If the first world population used air conditioning less, it would allow poor people, the third world, who tend to live in environments that are hotter and more subject to costs of climate change, to use air conditioning more without adding more to humanity's carbon footprint.
We as humans are quite greedy. We can live perfectly happy and comfortable lives with less plastic, less driving, less waste, but we have become addicted to all this consumption, all this convenience, and the ever greater convenience of consumption (couch shopping and to-your-door delivery, same day or hour even). We have tied our happiness to it. We have no qualms about being a small fraction of the Earth's population yet consuming and hoarding an extremely disproportionate amount of its resources, usually at the expense of poorer people, apparently because a meritocracy is at work.
The modern world's values are ever more driven by "me, me, me!" and less by "us".
> If the first world population used air conditioning less, it would allow poor people, the third world, who tend to live in environments that are hotter and more subject to costs of climate change, to use air conditioning more without adding more to humanity's carbon footprint.
This is not the only way. We could also produce cleaner energy in the first world by e.g. building nuclear, solar and (probably off-shore) wind. Then those of us in the first world and the poor of the third world could have the life-saving AC technology, and maybe make the third world a bit richer in the process.
I dont see what sentiment you are referring to in the article.
I have seen lots of people try to pull the ladder up on developing nations, so was expecting that in the article based on your comment. But instead found this:
> These cities are characterised by badly insulated buildings and energy-wasteful transport systems: these two inefficiencies consume far more fossil fuels than AC systems.
The article kind of rambled, but I agree with where it ends up, we should have always been pushing for more efficient A/C and heating (and in some places we were, proving it was possible and indeed irresponsible not to) and it is systems, not individual technologies, we should be fixing e.g. carbon taxes don't affect renewable powered AC (though we need to be careful about the refridgerents used).
The sentiment I was referring to is twofold: first, that A/C necessarily expends fossil fuels; second, that regulation (which, incidentally, indeed almost always does "pull the ladder up" for third-world nations) is the only way to reduce fossil fuel consumption.
And because the article is rambling, supporters of various remedies from AC unit regulation to thermostat regulation[0] (where regulators centrally control temperatures "only in emergencies") to even outright quotas or bans can each cite this article as justification. The unintended consequences of these are IMO anti-human.
Reductionist central planning thinking keeps on making the same errors over & over again. The fallacy is to blame a single culprit for a large set of problems & then create long standing institutions in the mainline of capital flow to manage the "war against" that single culprit. Of course the problems always gets worse because the survival of the long standing institutions managing the "war against" need the problems to continue growth of budgets & perceived reasons for existence.
Agreed that there is often an elitist liberal holier than thou dynamic at work. But that doesn't make the issue a non-issue. If you want to sink a knife into liberal virtue signaling and hypocrisy, I will twist that knife. But let's please not conflate things.
I also find your "anti-humanist" label completely unfair and prejudiced by your ideas of what is better for humanity.
I don’t disagree we can turn up the thermostat. At my house, we are at 73-74 on the summer. And we bought slightly undersized heat pumps which operate continuously (and more efficiently) on a typical day but are insufficient on the hottest 10-20 days of the year. This is so my kids will know at least a little bit of adversity, more than for environmental reasons, but still.
But messaging has a way of being simplified, and “anti-AC” is really the wrong tack.
commentor makes a single-leap from "air conditioning problems" to the genocidal label "anti-humanists" .. casually referred to as "unhinged thinking".. in other words, within one sentence, link something that reasonable people could disagree on (air-conditioning) to some extreme, repulsive and dangerous label of a trait and include all dissenters. YNews can do better than this.
I'm having a harder and harder time dealing with the extreme activism of today. It's really disappointing. While I enjoy the intellectual stimulation HN has to offer the tone and malice of activism, for any cause, has made this place toxic for me. The gain is knowledge is not worth witnessing the degradation of humanity.
> While I enjoy the intellectual stimulation HN has to offer the tone and malice of activism, for any cause, has made this place toxic for me. The gain is knowledge is not worth witnessing the degradation of humanity.
Ironically, it’s posts like yours that I find toxic.
The eco-harm it causes is more related to its energy use and how it is typically generated. But there are eco-friendly ways to generate (and store) energy, not burning fossil fuels in general, or even burning at all. You can't separate ACs from other energy consuming devices, the same could be said, about, I don't know, microwave ovens. Its the energy what should be redefined, how we get it.
Besides that, they are becoming more efficient, and there are alternative approaches to control temperature at homes.
It uses a lot less energy for people to live in a warm climate with air conditioning than a cold climate with heat. The US spends four times more on heating than cooling, primarily because of greater temperature differences.
Responsible environmentalists should set an example for everyone else and move to an area where heat isn’t required, then they can also choose to live without air conditioning.
The Texas power grid failed in the winter, not the summer.
It took me a long time to realize this I think because heating your house by 40 degrees F in the winter feels cozy and normal, while AC is loud and drippy and somehow feels unnatural even though mostly it only needs to drop 15 degrees.
>The Texas power grid failed in the winter, not the summer.
It could fail this summer due to insufficient capacity relative to demand. Alerts and calls for conservation have been provided starting last week, this time the lion's share of the increased risk can be attributed to air conditioning alone.
This occurred for a different reason in the winter because it got so unusually cold that the nominal water content of the natural gas froze in critical places within the delivery system and the gas could not be provided to the gas-fired electrical power plants. Unprecedented electrical climate-control demand was also a factor then.
When we were freezing in the dark with nothing but electrical heaters and no electricity, I didn't know how the traditional homes having natural gas connections fared. Nobody has gas lights any more but plenty still have gas heating & cooking. Natural gas is also often supposed to fuel household emergency generators, maybe they were OK to some extent. Liquified propane is a much more expensive alternative fuel gas and that's stored on site, but it could also possibly become obstructed by ice if it gets cold enough.
One thing about the way natural gas burns and electricity is made.
Traditionally it takes enough gas to heat 3 homes in order to produce the electricity to heat one home.
Regardless of price.
Not all of the energy from the gas is recovered either way, and after the electricity is delivered to the residence it is converted to heat more efficiently than gas but it's too late then to say there is a favorable comparison overall.
This leaves gas heat still less environmentally detrimental compared to electrical heat when the electricity is from a gas fired plant.
Pricing between these options when available can be expected to exaggerate uncertainties when comparing apples to oranges so there is that. Your pricing may vary, greatly.
Then there's the traditional thing about the way electricity heats and the way it cools.
Once you've got the electricity and you want to use it for temperature control, then it takes about 4 times as much electricity for an air-conditioner to make it one degree cooler than it takes for an elecric heater to make it one degree hotter.
Those electric heaters are wicked efficient on an electrical kWh basis.
But if you're on batteries you could easily conclude that any electric climate control is out-of-the question.
The remaining math can be derived from your own personal situation, and most often it can reveal why air-conditioning was considered nothing but a luxury item for so many generations until consumption got completely out-of-control.
An interesting side-effect although sadly not leveraged much in the US, and also little used in europe because of the stigma on AC, is that AC is a heat pump and heat pumps are reversible.
It’s finally gaining in popularity, and depending on weather conditions a modern heat pump can provide heating several times more efficient than straight up burning fuel even if you’re producing electricity from that fuel.
When your electricity is nuclear or hydro (or other renewables but that tends to be a bit sticky in winter) it’s manna.
It's a travesty that A/C units in the US are not (in many cases) designed to be reversible. I mean, even if you have a gas furnace, using the heat pump when it's only mildly cold can be cheaper.
This is really not true. Case in point, today where I am it will be overcast, 85*F, and very high humidity. We also get extreme cold in winter, so there's no getting around needing both AC and heating, but solar isn't a panacea. Unfortunately, hot cloudy days also don't tend to produce much wind either.
The AC system is not consuming the same energy in an overcast day versus an intensely sunny day, even if the outside air temperatures are comparable. The direct radiant heating of the structure with sun exposure introduces much more heat than the mere conductive transfer from outside air.
When people say that AC costs correlate with solar power, they are pointing out that the same solar energy that increases heat gain for buildings during the bright hours also increases photovoltaic output which can be used to compensate for that heat gain.
A bright sunny summer day will be hotter, but there's nothing magical about clouds that makes the need for air conditioning disappear unless you live in a desert.
At least in my region (central Europe) cloud cover is closely correlated with temperature. As in - when clouds and rain come during summer it gets colder as well.
I may be wrong here, no scientific data behind this.
>> The cooling gases in ACs also leak over time, and contain very strong greenhouse gases.
> As far as I know, modern appliances use gasses without this problem. It also holds for fridges.
Completely wrong, and the exact opposite of reality.
The currently-used gases are such a problem that the plan is to phase them out for new one in the upcoming years. Just do a search for "R410a phase out".
> Because of the global warming potential of many HFC refrigerants, the latest amendment to the Montreal Protocol, the Kigali Amendment, has proposed to phase-down the use of refrigerants such as R-410A. The phase down is expected to begin sometime in the 2020’s. The leading replacement for R-410A refrigerant is a pure, single component refrigerant called R-32, which has one-third the global warming potential of R‑410A.
It may be in the manual, or on a sticker on the system (along with electrical information (voltages, currents)).
> An increasingly important environmental concern is the disposal of old refrigerators—initially because freon coolant damages the ozone layer—but as older generation refrigerators wear out, the destruction of CFC-bearing insulation also causes concern. Modern refrigerators usually use a refrigerant called HFC-134a (1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane), which does not deplete the ozone layer, unlike Freon. R-134a is becoming much rarer in Europe. Newer refrigerants are being used instead. The main refrigerant now used is R-600a, or isobutane which has a smaller effect on the atmosphere if released.
As far as I know, gases that cause holes in the ozone layer aren't used anymore, but they're still extremely strong greenhouse gases (recent newspaper article I read mentioned 2000x CO2).
If I'm not mistaken, an average AC contains 200kg-1 ton CO2 equivalent gas.
Assuming we have one AC installation per person in developed countries, and each installation releases its full contents once every ten years, it would increase the carbon footprint of people in developed nations from ~10T/yr to ~10.02-10.1T a year.
Don't get me wrong - we should minimise the release of such gases and find better gases for AC, but it is not a significant issue right now.
First of all - yes, AC heats up outside as much as it cools down inside. But the temperatures get equalised over time (the moment you open windows, or hot air gets back in through poor insulation), so the overall balance is exactly zero.
But more importantly, even if we put all the energy produced by humanity into space heaters, we wouldn't be able to increase the planet's temperature by any measurable amount.
To give you a sense of perspective - Humanity produces 4 TW of electricity on average at any given moment. Sun delivers at that same moment 170,000 TW of energy.
From my understanding - the more significant factor in global warming is GHG emissions
Sure, moving the heat outside makes the environment slightly warmer, but that's nothing compared to the significant amounts of solar energy getting trapped because you made the energy to run your a/c by burning coal or any other fossil fuel
(Also - the volume of every place where you could reasonably want A/C is negligible compared to the volume of the earth's atmosphere, so that isn't as much of an issue)
It's you that has a fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy only increases, you cannot move heat without producing more. And it's not insignificant，a typical AC uses 1kWh to move 3kWh.
If energy was generated from wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydro etc then sure, knock yourself out
However energy is generated by burning fossil fuels
AC specifically allowed more economic activity in large areas of the world which drove more power usage which drove more AC in an increasing spiral. It's not the only energy multiplier, but cities like Dubai would not exist in anywhere near its current size and thus energy requirements without aircon, and instead economic acitivty would go to places with less energy overhead (you don't need aircon in anywhere near the same amounts in Istanbul for example)
Burning fossil fuels for energy is not something that happens everywhere. There has been important investments on clean energy all around the world, there are many countries and regions that don't rely on fossil fuels for energy. If you are worried about climate change, pushing for the use of clean energy generation will achieve more than not using AC.
it is without sustainable energy usage. Far better for Dubai to have retained its 1970s size and have say Karachi grow instead, same economic activity with less energy use.
Efficiency alone almost certainly will not allow us to avoid climate catastrophe, due to the Jevons Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox When an activity uses less energy and therefore becomes less expensive, people tend to simply engage more in that activity, until they use more energy than they did before. One reason why is obvious from your attitude here: our culture considers life to be more luxurious and enjoyable when you can do and consume more stuff, and advancing the idea of doing/consuming less is considered backwards and not "useful".
Insulation at the scale needed to avoid climate catastrophe would require a massive international mobilization, along the lines of the Green New Deal and a Green Marshall Plan, to renovate all buildings everywhere before 2050. Sadly the political will to do this seems absent from almost every country, with a couple possible exceptions such as Chile attempting to rewrite their constitution to prioritize climate justice. Basically no countries are approaching even the inadequate Paris agreement targets.
And if you achieved such insulation, without other more drastic changes to our society, people would just run their AC/heat more to reach more luxurious temperatures, and we would not avoid any greenhouse gas emissions.
> Efficiency alone almost certainly will not allow us to avoid climate catastrophe, due to the Jevons Paradox:
Meh, it depends.
Having a light bulb that uses 15W instead of 100W to illuminate a room is certainly a win. There's only so many lights that you'd put in a given area to achieve the same result, even if you add more for aesthetic reasons: there's only so many lumens that are useful in an area.
Furnaces and water heaters are now >90% efficient, and given that they (direct) vent from the outside, and exhaust to the outside increases safety and air leakage. Do you add more heaters and furnaces to a house because each is more efficient.
Cars are more efficient, and yet total annual distance driven (in the US) seems to have plateaued and fallen over the last decade or so:
> There's only so many lights that you'd put in a given area to achieve the same result, even if you add more for aesthetic reasons: there's only so many lumens that are useful in an area.
You'd think that, but we now see people experimenting with light bulbs that are bright as the sun, purportedly to improve their mood: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21660718 "I bought an extremely bright “corn cob” style bulb. It emits as much light as about 40 incandescents, and produces enough waste heat that it needs an internal cooling fan to dissipate it." It's not difficult to imagine a future where this is the norm, and people having anything dimmer than full sunlight indoors is considered medieval and backwards. We can always find new limits to what is "useful".
UPDATE: In that article, the author also says this of the lightbulb: "It draws about 2 kWh per day (assuming 8h of usage), which costs about $0.30 at typical rates. This is comparable to one day of a modern fridge or one load of laundry. Power is cheap, folks!" This is a perfect example of why we need to talk about climate justice, because the average American refrigerator consumes more energy than an average person in many countries: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23106061/energy-inequity-...
The rest of the world cannot live the way we currently do in the USA, if we are to avoid catastrophic global heating.
I dislike whoever named this phenomenon since it is not a paradox.
A lot of people bring this up, but fail to realize that there is a limit to induced demand. For example if you are able to light your house with led bulbs you aren't suddenly going to throw up more lights to light up the neighborhood. There are actual limits to demand and you can exceed them through efficiency gains.
There are individual limits to demand, but not societal limits. If LEDs become more efficient, I will not throw up more lights, but Times Square will - and eventually they'll expand operations and build Los Angeles Square.
Jevons Paradox is about these societal demands, which influence collective usage of a resource in the opposite direction from individual usage.
> And if you achieved such insulation, without other more drastic changes to our society, people would just run their AC/heat more to reach more luxurious temperatures.
But that has an upper limit - there is an ideal temperature. People won't be cooling their houses to 15°C in the summer and heating them to 40°C in the winter.
Just want to point out that framing it as "climate justice" does absolutely zero favors to anybody who uses it as a selling point. The people who agree with the underlying idea already agree. You only alienate people (like me) who see that term and go "what the fuck are you talking about, what justice, you're not making any sense anymore" even when the underlying ideas are fine. Activists the world 'round need to realize they do not convince people with these terms.
Aside from the fact that this paradox is not written in stone...
Just because the efficiency increases and we use less energy doesn't mean that the cost will fall. The cost of energy will most likely rise in the upcoming years due to factoring in the co2 emissions.
At least in Europe and in Poland specifically we are preparing right now for a winter of extremely high energy prices and heating prices. Delivering heat pumps and insulating buildings is on top of government agenda right now. And that is in the middle of summer when temperatures are 20-40 deg C outside.
Yes, a very important principle. See also road building and induced demand.
Therefore we should be working to reduce supply of fossil fuels, to 'keep it in the ground'. If there is less to go round, then efficiencies will still be found but used to maintain what we had (as far as practicable) as opposed to increasing demand
The concept of “induced demand” as if it’s a bad thing is irredeemably stupid. It’s like saying “adding Internet bandwidth is pointless because demand will just rise to match capacity, and we should go back to the days of 56K modems”.
I assume you recognize that if you raise prices but also redistribute wealth, people would still collectively continue to use the resource in the same amount.
Someone has to go without to reduce the total consumption. Who is it in your example? And by how much such that the total usage decreases?
If air conditioning is top 3, blinds (the kind that actually keeps heat out, which you find in Mediterranean countries, not the shitty ones you put inside the room) are worth a Nobel prize.
And stepwells, and latticework false walls, and high ceilings, and ventilators at the top of the house, and having a false-basement thing in houses where it's a bit cooler in the afternoons, and siestas and walking slowly from place to place, and loose-fitting linen clothing, and lemonade. But no. My shitty white plastic Carrier A/C is all I care about. Housing in the US is depressingly shite.
Agreed. We're just learning now, in the current heatwave, how effective blackout blinds are in keep the heat out (white coloured backing facing the sun). It's great.
> Air conditioning is probably a top 3-5 all time human invention.
No such much AC specifically, but rather the refrigerant loop generally, IMHO.
Being able to keep humans cool, but also food chilled (to limit bacteria growth), food frozen (for long term storage and transport), as well as medication, vaccines, blood, tissue samples, etc.
The cold chain (in logistics) is a marvel of human accomplishment:
It's actually incoherent. The author concludes that we need to move away from fossil fuels as a species. So AC is fine then, yeah? Or is the plan to give ourselves heat stroke until we figure out sustainable energy? Why is my higher standard of living being compared to those in Africa? I don't live in Africa.
"Letting the outside in" is pretty nice when the outside is within reasonable bounds, and you seem to be lucky enough to have that, but when the outside is 40C and above, or 99% humidity, it's just turning daily life to hell.
And yes, we can both increase efficiency and make sure the origin of electricity is from renewable source to make things better. It will consume more energy than not doing it at all, but believe me, ask anyone that lives in a place where the weather is at least a bit harsh (apparently not your case), the price is definitely worth it.
As for the rant about building shopping malls and parking lots, there's been quite a lot of development since the 90's. All the new projects I see popping up contain greenery and parks develop wild patches, and mega-malls are falling into disrepair.
My friend, I lived most of my life in India. Trust me. I know everything there is to know about heat. I KNOW the engineers who're in this field. I see them every year at the same damn conference, where they talk the same damn talk all the time.
Hypothetically, sure, one can do both. Improve efficiency AND reduce. But please, tell me where we've done that? CPUs? Electricity usage? CO2 emissions? Nowhere.
None of it makes sense, unless you assume that they are not very bright, or the actual goal is to dismantle the current civilisation due to malcontent stemming from the projection of personal issues.
Put another way, AC allows rampant population growth in places that are going to become otherwise uninhabitable to extreme heat (if they aren’t already). Swings and roundabouts.
We've been forcing interiors to be warm with technology for a million years, it stands next to the stone ax as our original invention.
Last century we figured out how to force interiors to be cool, reliably.
This must not be confused with the tendency to squander our unique gift of abundant energy. Places like Arizona could have houses with massive walls, arcades, all the refinements the Pueblo, Persians, and many others have brought to living in arid regions: and air conditioning, which is a wonderful invention.
If your solution to ecological crisis is to return humanity to immiseration, I reject that utterly. There are more dangerous things than warm weather and this attitude is prominent among them.
Obviously air conditioning is really useful in a hot climate. As someone who does a lot of moving between places with/without it, it's interesting to see how overused it can be in much of the US. Your office in the northeast does not need to be 69 degrees inside all summer long.
In my experience, this can be due to poorly designed/functioning HVAC systems. My office is regularly in the sixties while the guy on the opposite side of the building is sweating.
It's useful in warm and humid climates. In warm and dry climates, a swamp cooler will beat the pants off of an airconditioner in damn near every metric you can think of.
So, sure, in the swamps of Florida, we should be OK with using the AC. But in the dry heat of Texas? Or southern California? Why doesn't America do even the simple things right? In city planning, in cooling, in HOA's dictating lawn upkeep and on and on and on.
The absurd overuse of AC seems like a peculiarity of the United States. Walk into an American household in the summer, and you find people watching TV with blankets or a sweatshirt because the temperature is so low. In the winter, the opposite is true: the house is overheated, so everyone wears short sleeves. You’re pretty much forced to do this in older apartment buildings where you have no thermostat and the landlord cranks the heat up to Saharan temperatures. The only way to regulate the temperature is to open windows, and that doesn’t always work well. Tell me that’s not wasting energy. Maybe start there if you want to actually contribute meaningfully.
Such a bizarre set of practices. The point of HVAC is to bring the temperature to a comfortable level while you wear season appropriate clothing, not to eliminate or invert seasonal differences.
For shared housing like apartments I kind of get extremes opposite the outside temperature. I can be in my underwear (work from home for the win) still a little warm and my wife will be wearing long clothes and one of those hoodie blankets. If there were a weight differential I imagine this would only get worse. Multiply that by everyone living in a building, you're going to get some people far from the mean. Things like wearing tons of clothes in the AC and opening windows in the winter are just ways to give more granular control so it's not trying to fit everyone into one bucket. In single homes it tends towards more plain inefficient as the number of people to optimize for lowers but that leads to the next point.
In general I don't think efficiency is really a problem. It's self regulating, being more inefficient costs you more so you must find it worth it and that's your choice. The real issue is the incentive mismatch of dirty energy sources being cheaper than clean energy sources. There is nothing inherently problematic with someone deciding using 2 mWh instead of 1 mWh in a month is how they want to do things or deciding it's not worth trying to change things around to optimize.
It's a thing in the nicer parts of India too, but I agree. I remember going to NYC when it was quite hot and seeing Toy Story 3. The cinema was so cold, each seat had a huge AC blasting on it at an arctic temperature. I'm not sure what the intention is. It does seem to me, as you say, that the greatest desire of americans is to live in the southern hemisphere, whether unconsciously or consciously. My guess? Americans have a strong erotic lust for both power and the subversion of nature, so it is almost sexually arousing to demonstrate enough power, even unnecessarily, to totally reverse the seasons. See also: guns, massive cars with 10 cup holders, huge interstate roads with 5 lanes in each direction, extremely consumer-engineered foods, etc.
I once heard that certain car models couldn't be sold on the US market without changes because the AC didn't cool the interior fast enough after sitting in the sun.
I'm not sure if this was just a joke. I could totally see this being true whichsays a lot already.
There are actually far less energy intensive ways to make houses cool...
Everything from painting the roof in special IR emitting and visible light reflecting paint...
To using evaporative cooling (even a small amount of water can make a large cooling effect).
To having large amounts of insulation to keep things cool in the daytime and cooling stuff down at night when the outside is cooler.
To using chilling loops deep underground where the soil is far cooler, or into rivers (where the water is typically cooler) than surface temperatures.
There are so many options for getting coolness with lower energy cost and lower eco-harm... I think it's a real shame we haven't done just a little more R&D to make them viable and commonplace instead of electrically driven air-air heat pumps which really gobble energy.
None of these solutions are anywhere near as easy as simply installing an A/C unit. Which is why A/C is so popular. People would love to cool (and heat) their homes in more environmentally friendly ways, provided those ways are as convenient and as cheap as A/C. Which they're not.
If anything, insulation (on its own) worsens the problem, because once the heat gets in, it's effectively trapped for days. If it's not combined with shading, or some other way to reflect heat away from the windows, a hot house becomes a hothouse real fast...
I wish there were an easy way to couple all heat producing and heat dissipating devices in my home. Too much heat in my bedroom? Move it into the hot water tank. Too cold in the living room? Use the waste heat from the oven to heat the room.
I'm thinking about blinds, but they cost 10k eur to install and require approval from the union of house owners.
So I opted for heat-reflective window foils instead. Only costed 30 eur. They help — but only a little. Maybe cool my living rooms by 1C or 2C in the summer. In the mean time my wife complains that the rooms are too dark and uncomfortable. She doesn't understand why I don't just install AC. Neither does anyone else in her social group.
So, what is a man going to do to keep his wife happy?
As an individual, just do whatever is most cost effective.
As someone willing to put effort in to make the world a better place, start a company to develop a low energy equivalent. For example, data centers (which are very energy conscious), are typically cooled with evaporative chillers. They can typically keep the indoor air 15C or so below outdoor air temperatures, especially when humidity is low.
The challenge is evaporative chillers require quite a lot of maintenance (in a datacenter, someone will check water PH and dissolved solids every day for example)... Your efforts will go into automating this process.
Perhaps build a 'home evaporative chiller'? The reward could be huge - many people spend $1000/year or more on electricity for AC. If you can sell them something that costs only $100/year in water charges, they might be happy to pay you say $500 as a service fee/equipment rental.
Germany is poised to move all heating for buildings to electrical heat pumps in the foreseeable future (with some exceptions). With some minor differences it's the same tech, just used for heating instead of cooling. Not long ago everyone made fun of "the Americans" and their ACs. Funny how times change.
"A move away from fossil fuels requires the wholesale transformation of all these systems."
That is why people do not understand both the scope and the urgency of the issue. Technically it is an easy problem to fix, but to change the hearts and minds of people will take a spiritual revolution.
So crazy this kind of writing I refuse to read it. I think one could write how many x causing harm … how about the very existence of human and so much eco-harm this species cause.
I really don't see the problem at all. Solar energy is plentiful when you need airconditioning, so you can simply power the compressor using solar power.
if honestly people think AC is bad for the environment people could switch to water based cooling systems. these are known as "coolers" in India and are used widely during summers as they are cheap and use really low amount of electricity and have zero effect on environment. it just costs like 30$ when compared to 300$ AC systems and have many advantages both economical and environmental. not sure why it hasn't picked up in developed nations?
Swamp coolers were widely used before A/C was cheap enough to become mainstream. Most people in the southern U.S. for instance may have a grandparent or great grandparent that can still tell stories of how miserable they are compared to A/C!
Before air conditioning, there was the rise of central heating.
Is the total energy used for the combination of heating and cooling greater in a warm climate or a cold climate, given the same floor space and appropriate insulation and construction?
I was under the impression that less energy would be needed in Dallas than in Chicago, but I don't have actual data.
Unfortunately AC is going to become a necessary reality even in countries where it is traditionally avoided, like the UK or mainland Europe. Here in Germany we had to buy one for our rabbits, who will simply die without it. In the UK it will reach 40 next week across many areas of the country. An article on the Guardian says that we can avoid AC in these extreme weather situations by using techniques such as "opening windows". Totally delusional. Then you have the UK climate deniers which are extremely numerous and are claiming that 40C is a totally normal and expected part of the British summer.
I think that it will not be long before believing in anthropogenic climate change will become political suicide, since who wants to hear the bad news that we have no solution for? Even worse are those who claim that "we will solve it with science, we always do". It is already too late, and the momentum is getting insane. Nothing we can do about it. A billion brown people will die, and all white people will have AC.
how does 40C in UK compared to 40c in the tropics? is it heat directly from the sun? Or is the atmosphere hot? or does the ground radiate heat? these three different types of 40C have different mitigation strategies but will be given the same number (40C) by weather report sources. All heat is not the same. humid 40C is completely different from dry 40C. Each of these various types of heat will have different effects on our health and efficiency and have different strategies to mitigate it.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but yeah 40C is much more severe in the UK than it is in the tropics for a huge number of reasons: lack of shade from trees (generally UK is pretty treeless in suburbs), more humid, no shutters on windows, etc.
by tropics I don't mean something like the bornean rainforest. many cities like Dubai, Lagos, Mumbai, Cairo, Bangkok, Jakarta all exist in the tropics.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/study...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/06/28/1010923130/the-pacific-northw...