It’s a human right in Texas, at least

Published 7:13 pm Wednesday, July 24, 2013

By Staff Reports

 

Come to Texas — we’ll show you. That’s the only rational response to the blizzard of editorials and commentary pieces about air conditioning, and why we should do without it.

Writing for the Boston Globe, Leon Neyfakh acknowledges that heat waves exist — he cites temperatures that “skyrocketed” last week in Boston.

“As anybody who’s been through this harrowing experience knows, living in most parts of America during the summer these days means being dependent on A/C,” he writes. “With temperatures regularly climbing past 90, we expect to be made thermally comfortable everywhere we go, including in the cars or subways we take to get there.”

Amateurs.

A day reaching 91 or 92 degrees is considered relief for Texans in August. But we interrupt. Neyfakh argues that air conditioning is a modern convenience that comes at a high price.



“Although there are a handful of anti-A/C crusaders out there, the idea that we need to be using less of it hasn’t become a touchstone of environmental enlightenment, like recycling or hybrid cars,” he writes. “This may well be an indication of how deeply it has shaped our world: While we can imagine giving up plastic bags and Styrofoam, living without climate control seems unfathomable, especially during a heat wave.”

He says it would be easy to give up air conditioning.

“The human body is quite well suited to deal with heat if we let it, and if we back away just a little bit from our assumptions about what it means to be comfortable, it’s easy to picture an alternate reality in which, instead of flipping on the freon at the slightest provocation, we learn to cope with the air we have,” he says.

But why should we? For one thing, air conditioning saves lives. The Washington Post reported on a study last year that found heat-related deaths declined in the last half-century as Americans started using more air conditioning.

The study adds that many, many more lives could be saved in India, for example, with wider adoption of air conditioning.

Second, while air conditioning has been a technology with a big environmental impact in the past, we’ve largely mitigated that. The 1987 Montreal Protocol regulated the use of ozone-harming chemicals in the coolant, and even the electricity used to power the technology is decreasing in carbon emissions.

If there’s a current climate impact from air conditioning, it’s largely coming from China and other developing countries. If they’re using harmful chemicals and coal-fired power plants, there’s little that self-imposed A/C regulations in American will do about that.

In fact, Americans use air conditioning in the most responsible way possible, and that’s for a reason that has nothing to do with rules: It’s not cheap to cool a building in the summer. So we design more efficient homes and offices, and we monitor our own usage.

Let the intelligentsia abandon air conditioning if it wants. But we’re in Texas, and we’ll keep ours, thank you very much. If they’d like to know why, we invite them down to enjoy a Texas summer day.