The Foolish Optimism of Taking Out an Air Conditioner
I don’t like air conditioning. Besides the obvious environmental impacts, I don’t like feeling blasts of cold air when I walk into a grocery store in the summer. I don’t like houses where you can’t open up the windows on a pleasant day because you’ll let out all the artificially cooled air. I don’t like using machines when their job is unnecessary.
There are others like me. Italians superstitiously believe the cold air from air conditioners causes maladies. Aretha Franklin once stopped a show when the air conditioning kicked on because she feared that the artificially cool air would harm her voice. The city of Barcelona hasn’t widely adopted air conditioning despite its hot summers, choosing not to blemish their city’s architecture with air conditioner units glommed onto their buildings. Instead, the city beats the heat by heading into the city’s plazas in the evening, waiting for the heat from the day to pass.
I’m happy to join this team of anti-air-conditioners.
My distaste for air conditioning is wrapped up in the irony of the technology. The more air conditioning we use, the more the planet warms from the electricity necessary to run the machines, making us use air conditioning even more. This vicious circle is even more immediate in dense, urban neighborhoods, where warm air expelled from buildings can measurably raise the outdoor temperature.
There is the further irony that some of the world’s hottest places are too poor to afford air conditioning. The blameless will pay the price for the wealthy world insisting that we keep our indoors completely comfortable in the summer, so comfortable that you need to wear a sweater inside a movie theater.
It was with some satisfaction, then, that I took out the old air conditioner from my house.
I’m not making much of a sacrifice. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I live, has just about the coolest summers you can get in America. You might not guess it though if you talked to people up here. Yoopers hate the heat. It’s endearing, really. We live in a climate that sees single digit lows in the winter and average summer highs in the mid-70s, and it’s the summer that people complain about more! I am certain that Yoopers would wither in most any other climate.
So, despite what some heat-fearing Yoopers might believe, air conditioning is unnecessary up here.
And besides being unnecessary, the air conditioner unit was ugly, sticking right out the front wall of the house like an architectural parasite. On the inside, the grey plastic machine from the 70s was the first thing to greet you into the house
It doesn’t seem like a typical American quality to care about public beauty over private comfort, but I think removing the air conditioner had made the house a bit nicer looking.
I guess taking out the air conditioner counts as a sign of optimism, a belief that dangerous heat won’t come too soon, at least not up here. I trust that the old oak tree in the side yard will keep shading our house. On the really hot days, we have a basement that stays cool. We are lucky that the cool waters of Lake Superior are just a short bike ride away.
Or if things get too bad, I could install a solar chimney, a passive cooling device that has been used for centuries in hot climates.
But maybe all this won’t be enough. I just finished reading The Heat Will Kill you First by Jeff Goodell. I’m aware that climate change is making dangerous heat waves more likely, even in climates that normally don’t experience extreme heat. Not having air conditioning in a warming world can be deadly, especially for vulnerable populations. 70,000 people died in a heat wave in Europe in 2003. More than 700 people died in Chicago in 1995, mostly people without air conditioning in their homes.
If I’m being honest, I am not all that optimistic about the climate. I didn’t think I would see the effects of climate change so early in my life. I didn’t think I would feel 112 degree heat in the Pacific Northwest, a place that is not supposed to get that hot. I didn’t think I’d see pictures of Koalas burning in Australia. I didn’t think I would find a place that felt like home more than any other and then decide to leave because of growing wildfire risk.
The heat is coming. That is why I think we need to do everything we can to prevent climate change. We could solely beat the heat by doubling down on air conditioners, but we’d be fools if we did so. I wouldn’t be that surprised. Air conditioners are the Ozempic of global warming. Air conditioners are a cocktail of self-medication to deal with your mental health instead of figuring out the underlying issues. Relying on air conditioners to keep us cool in a warming world is a sign that we are too far gone, that we can only think of technology to save us, that we are not willing to holistically heal ourselves and our planet.
I have only a smidge of hope that we are not such fools.