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On a sweltering Thursday evening in Manhattan last month, people across New York City were preparing for what meteorologists predicted would be the hottest weekend of the year. Over the past two decades, every record for peak electricity use in the city has occurred during a heatwave, as millions of people turn on their air conditioning units at the same time. And so, at the midtown headquarters of Con Edison, the company that supplies more than 10 million people in the New York area with electricity, employees were busy turning a conference room on the 19th floor into an emergency command centre.
Inside the conference room, close to 80 engineers and company executives, joined by representatives of the city\u2019s emergency management department, monitored the status of the city power grid, directed ground crews and watched a set of dials displaying each borough\u2019s electricity use tick upward. \u201cIt\u2019s like the bridge in Star Trek in there,\u201d Anthony Suozzo, a former senior system operator with the company, told me. \u201cYou\u2019ve got all hands on deck, they\u2019re telling Scotty to fix things, the system is running at max capacity.\u201d
Power grids are measured by the amount of electricity that can pass through them at any one time. Con Edison\u2019s grid, with 62 power substations and more than 130,000 miles of power lines and cables across New York City and Westchester County, can deliver 13,400MW every second. This is roughly equivalent to 18m horsepower.
On a regular day, New York City demands around 10,000MW every second; during a heatwave, that figure can exceed 13,000MW. \u201cDo the math, whatever that gap is, is the AC,\u201d Michael Clendenin, a company spokesman, told me. The combination of high demand and extreme temperature can cause parts of the system to overheat and fail, leading to blackouts. In 2006, equipment failure left 175,000 people in Queens without power for a week, during a heatwave that killed 40 people.
This year, by the evening of Sunday 21 July, with temperatures above 36C (97F) and demand at more than 12,000MW every second, Con Edison cut power to 50,000 customers in Brooklyn and Queens for 24 hours, afraid that parts of the nearby grid were close to collapse, which could have left hundreds of thousands of people without power for days. The state had to send in police to help residents, and Con Edison crews dispensed dry ice for people to cool their homes.
As the world gets hotter, scenes like these will become increasingly common. Buying an air conditioner is perhaps the most popular individual response to climate change, and air conditioners are almost uniquely power-hungry appliances: a small unit cooling a single room, on average, consumes more power than running four fridges, while a central unit cooling an average house uses more power than 15. \u201cLast year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity was going to air conditioning,\u201d says John Dulac, an analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA). \u201cThese are \u2018oh shit\u2019 moments.\u201d
There are just over 1bn single-room air conditioning units in the world right now \u2013 about one for every seven people on earth. Numerous reports have projected that by 2050 there are likely to be more than 4.5bn, making them as ubiquitous as the mobile phone is today. The US already uses as much electricity for air conditioning each year as the UK uses in total. The IEA projects that as the rest of the world reaches similar levels, air conditioning will use about 13% of all electricity worldwide, and produce 2bn tonnes of CO2 a year \u2013 about the same amount as India, the world\u2019s third-largest emitter, produces today.
All of these reports note the awful irony of this feedback loop: warmer temperatures lead to more air conditioning; more air conditioning leads to warmer temperatures. The problem posed by air conditioning resembles, in miniature, the problem we face in tackling the climate crisis. The solutions that we reach for most easily only bind us closer to the original problem.
The global dominance of air conditioning was not inevitable. As recently as 1990, there were only about 400m air conditioning units in the world, mostly in the US. Originally built for industrial use, air conditioning eventually came to be seen as essential, a symbol of modernity and comfort. Then air conditioning went global. Today, as with other drivers of the climate crisis, we race to find solutions \u2013 and puzzle over how we ended up so closely tied to a technology that turns out to be drowning us.
Like the aqueduct or the automobile, air conditioning is a technology that transformed the world. Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of independent Singapore, called it \u201cone of the signal inventions of history\u201d that allowed the rapid modernisation of his tropical country. In 1998, the American academic Richard Nathan told the New York Times that, along with the \u201ccivil rights revolution\u201d, air conditioning had been the biggest factor in changing American demography and politics over the previous three decades, enabling extensive residential development in the very hot, and very conservative, American south.
A century ago, few would have predicted this. For the first 50 years of its existence, air conditioning was mainly restricted to factories and a handful of public spaces. The initial invention is credited to Willis Carrier, an American engineer at a heating and ventilation company, who was tasked in 1902 with reducing humidity in a Brooklyn printing factory. Today we assume that the purpose of air conditioning is to reduce heat, but engineers at the time weren\u2019t solely concerned with temperature. They wanted to create the most stable possible conditions for industrial production \u2013 and in a print factory, humidity curled sheets of paper and smudged ink.
Carrier realised that removing heat from the factory air would reduce humidity, and so he borrowed technology from the nascent refrigeration industry to create what was, and still is, essentially a jacked-up fridge. Then as now, air conditioning units work by breathing in warm air, passing it across a cold surface, and exhaling cool, dry air. The invention was an immediate success with industry \u2013 textile, ammunition, and pharmaceutical factories were among the first adopters \u2013 and then began to catch on elsewhere. The House of Representatives installed air conditioning in 1928, followed by the White House and the Senate in 1929. But during this period, most Americans encountered air conditioning only in places such as theatres or department stores, where it was seen as a delightful novelty.
It wasn\u2019t until the late 1940s, when it began to enter people\u2019s homes, that the air conditioner really conquered the US. Before then, according to the historian Gail Cooper, the industry had struggled to convince the public that air conditioning was a necessity, rather than a luxury. In her definitive account of the early days of the industry, Air-Conditioning America, Cooper notes that magazines described air conditioning as a flop with consumers. Fortune called it \u201ca prime public disappointment of the 1930s\u201d. By 1938 only one out of every 400 American homes had an air conditioner; today it is closer to nine out of 10.
What fuelled the rise of the air conditioning was not a sudden explosion in consumer demand, but the influence of the industries behind the great postwar housing boom. Between 1946 and 1965, 31m new homes were constructed in the US, and for the people building those houses, air conditioning was a godsend. Architects and construction companies no longer had to worry much about differences in climate \u2013 they could sell the same style of home just as easily in New Mexico as in Delaware. The prevailing mentality was that just about any problems caused by hot climates, cheap building materials, shoddy design or poor city planning could be overcome, as the American Institute of Architects wrote in 1973, \u201cby the brute application of more air conditioning\u201d. As Cooper writes, \u201cArchitects, builders and bankers accepted air conditioning first, and consumers were faced with a fait accompli that they merely had to ratify.\u201d
Equally essential to the rise of the air conditioner were electric utilities \u2013 the companies that operate power plants and sell electricity to consumers. Electric utilities benefit from every new house hooked up to their grid, but throughout the early 20th century they were also looking for ways to get these new customers to use even more electricity in their homes. This process was known as \u201cload building\u201d, after the industry term (load) for the amount of electricity used at any one time. \u201cThe cost of electricity was low, which was fine by the utilities. They simply increased demand, and encouraged customers to use more electricity so they could keep expanding and building new power plants,\u201d says Richard Hirsh, a historian of technology at Virginia Tech.
The utilities quickly recognised that air conditioning was a serious load builder. As early as 1935, Commonwealth Edison, the precursor to the modern Con Edison, noted in its end-of-year report that the power demand from air conditioners was growing at 50% a year, and \u201coffered substantial potential for the future\u201d. That same year, Electric Light & Power, an industry trade magazine, reported that utilities in big cities \u201care now pushing air conditioning. For their own good, all power companies should be very active in this field.\u201d
By the 1950s, that future had arrived. Electric utilities ran print, radio and film adverts promoting air conditioning, as well as offering financing and discount rates to construction companies that installed it. In 1957, Commonwealth Edison reported that for the first time, peak electricity usage had occurred not in the winter, when households were turning up their heating, but during summer, when people were turning on their air-conditioning units. By 1970, 35% of American houses had air conditioning, more than 200 times the number just three decades earlier.
At the same time, air-conditioning-hungry commercial buildings were springing up across the US. The all-glass skyscraper, a building style that, because of its poor reflective properties and lack of ventilation, often requires more than half its electricity output be reserved for air conditioning, became an American mainstay. Between 1950 and 1970 the average electricity used per square foot in commercial buildings more than doubled. New York\u2019s World Trade Center, completed in 1974, had what was then the world\u2019s largest AC unit, with nine enormous engines and more than 270km of piping for cooling and heating. Commentators at the time noted that it used the same amount of electricity each day as the nearby city of Schenectady, population 80,000.
The air-conditioning industry, construction companies and electric utilities were all riding the great wave of postwar American capitalism. In their pursuit of profit, they ensured that the air conditioner became an essential element of American life. \u201cOur children are raised in an air-conditioned culture,\u201d an AC company executive told Time magazine in 1968. \u201cYou can\u2019t really expect them to live in a home that isn\u2019t air conditioned.\u201d Over time, the public found they liked air conditioning, and its use continued to climb, reaching 87% of US households by 2009.
The postwar building spree was underpinned by the idea that all of these new buildings would consume incredible amounts of power, and that this would not present any serious problems in the future. In 1992, the journal Energy and Buildings published an article by the British conservative academic Gwyn Prins, arguing that the American addiction to air conditioning was a symbol of its profound decadence. Prins summarised America\u2019s guiding credo as: \u201cWe shall be cool, our plates shall overflow and gas shall be $1 a gallon, Amen.\u201d
During the time that air conditioning was reshaping America\u2019s cities, it had little effect elsewhere. (With some exceptions \u2013 Japan, Australia and Singapore were early adopters.) Now, however, air conditioning is finally sweeping across the rest of the world. If the march of air conditioning across the US tracked its postwar building and consumption boom, its more recent expansion has followed the course of globalisation. As the rest of the world adopts more Americanised ways of building and living, air conditioning follows.
In the 1990s, many countries across Asia opened up to foreign investment and embarked on an unprecedented urban building spree. Over the past three decades, about 200 million people in India have moved to cities; in China, the number is more than 500 million. From New Delhi to Shanghai, heavily air-conditioned office buildings, hotels and malls began to spring up. These buildings were not only indistinguishable from those in New York or London, but were often constructed by the same builders and architects. \u201cWhen you had this money coming in from the rest of the world for high-end buildings, it often came with an American or European designer or consultancy attached,\u201d says Ashok Lall, an Indian architect who focuses on housing and low-energy design. \u201cAnd so it comes as a package with AC. They thought that meant progress.\u201d
As the rate and scale of building intensified, traditional architectural methods for mitigating hot temperatures were jettisoned. Leena Thomas, an Indian professor of architecture at the University of Technology in Sydney, told me that in Delhi in the early 1990s older forms of building design \u2013 which had dealt with heat through window screens, or facades and brise-soleils \u2013 were slowly displaced by American or European styles. \u201cI would say that this international style has a lot to answer for,\u201d she said. Just like the US in the 20th century, but on an even greater scale, homes and offices were increasingly being built in such a way that made air conditioning indispensable. \u201cDevelopers were building without thinking,\u201d says Rajan Rawal, a professor of architecture and city planning at Cept University in Ahmedabad. \u201cThe speed of construction that was required created pressure. So they simply built and relied on technology to fix it later.\u201d
Lall says that even with affordable housing it is possible to reduce the need for air conditioning by designing carefully. \u201cYou balance the sizes of opening, the area of the wall, the thermal properties, and shading, the orientation,\u201d he says. But he argues that, in general, developers are not interested. \u201cEven little things like adequate shading and insulation in the rooftop are resisted. The builders don\u2019t appear to see any value in this. They want 10- to 20-storey blocks close to one another. That\u2019s just how business works now, that\u2019s what the cities are forcing us to do. It\u2019s all driven by speculation and land value.\u201d
This reliance on air conditioning is a symptom of what the Chinese art critic Hou Hanru has called the epoch of post-planning. Today, planning as we traditionally think of it \u2013 centralised, methodical, preceding development \u2013 is vanishingly rare. Markets dictate and allocate development at incredible speed, and for the actual inhabitants, the conditions they require to live are sourced later, in a piecemeal fashion. \u201cYou see these immense towers go up, and they\u2019re already locking the need for air conditioning into the building,\u201d says Marlyne Sahakian, a sociologist who studies the use of air conditioning in the Philippines.
Over coffee recently in London, the influential Malaysian architect Ken Yeang lamented what he viewed as the loss of an entire generation of architects and builders to a dependency on fossil fuels to control the environment. \u201cSo much damage has been done by those buildings,\u201d he says, \u201cI have entirely lost hope in my generation; perhaps the next one can design a rescue mission.\u201d
To its proponents, air conditioning is often presented as a simple choice that consumers make to improve their lives as they climb the economic ladder. \u201cIt\u2019s no longer a luxury product but a necessity,\u201d an executive at the Indian branch of the Japanese air-conditioner manufacturing giant Daikin told the Associated Press last year. \u201cEveryone deserves AC.\u201d
This refrain is as familiar in Rajasthan now as it was in the US 70 years ago. Once air conditioning is embedded in people\u2019s lives, they tend to want to keep it. But that fact obscures the ways that consumers\u2019 choices are shaped by forces beyond their control. In her 1967 book Vietnam, Mary McCarthy reflected on this subtle restriction of choice in American life. \u201cIn American hotel rooms,\u201d she wrote, \u201cyou can decide whether or not to turn on the air conditioning (that is your business), but you cannot open the window.\u201d
One step towards solving the problem presented by air conditioning \u2013 and one that doesn\u2019t require a complete overhaul of the modern city \u2013 would be to build a better air conditioner. There is plenty of room for improvement. The invention of air conditioning predates both the first aeroplane and the first public radio broadcast, and the underlying technology has not changed much since 1902. \u201cEverything is still based on the vapour compression cycle; same as a refrigerator. It\u2019s effectively the same process as a century ago,\u201d says Colin Goodwin, the technical director of the Building Services Research and Information Association. \u201cWhat has happened is we\u2019ve expanded the affordability of the air conditioner, but as far as efficiency, they\u2019ve improved but they haven\u2019t leaped.\u201d
One scheme to encourage engineers to build a more efficient air conditioner was launched last year by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a US-based energy policy thinktank, and endorsed by the UN environment programme and government of India. They are offering $3m to the winner of the inaugural Global Cooling prize. The aim is to design an air conditioner that is five times more efficient than the current standard model, but which costs no more than twice as much money to produce. They have received more than a hundred entries, from lone inventors to prominent universities, and even research teams from multibillion-dollar appliance giants.
But, as with other technological responses to climate change, it is far from certain that the arrival of a more efficient air conditioner will significantly reduce global emissions. According to the RMI, in order to keep total global emissions from new air conditioners from rising, their prize-winning efficient air conditioner would need to go on sale no later than 2022, and capture 80% of the market by 2030. In other words, the new product would have to almost totally replace its rivals in less than a decade. Benjamin Sovacool, professor of energy policy at Sussex University and a lead author on the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, describes this ambition as not impossible, but pretty unlikely.
\u201cThis idea of technology saving us is a narrative that we want to believe. Its simplicity is comforting,\u201d he says. It has proven so comforting, in fact, that it is often discussed as if it is our first and best response to climate change \u2013 even as the timeframe for inventing and implementing such technologies becomes so narrow as to strain credulity.
New air-conditioner technology would be welcome, but it is perhaps \u201cthe fourth, or maybe fifth thing on the list we should do\u201d to reduce the emissions from air conditioning, says Diana \u00dcrge-Vorsatz, a professor of climate change and energy policy at Central European University, and a lead author on the forthcoming IPCC report. Among the higher priorities that she mentions are planting trees, retrofitting old buildings with proper ventilation, and no longer building \u201cconcrete and glass cages that can\u2019t withstand a heatwave\u201d. She adds: \u201cAll of these things would be cheaper too, in the long run.\u201d
But while these things are technically cheaper, they require changes in behaviour and major policy shifts \u2013 and the open secret of the climate crisis is that nobody really knows how to make these kind of changes on the systematic, global scale that the severity of the crisis demands.
If we are not about to be rescued by technology, and worldwide policy changes look like a distant hope, there remains a very simple way of reducing the environmental damage done by air conditioning: use less of it. But, as the ecological economist and IPCC author Julia Steinberger has written, any serious proposals to change our lifestyles \u2013 cutting down on driving, flying or imported avocados \u2013 are considered \u201cbeyond the pale, heretic, almost insane\u201d. This is especially true of air conditioning, where calls to use it less are frequently treated as suggestions that people should die in heatwaves, or evidence of a malicious desire to deny other people the same comforts that citizens in wealthy countries already enjoy.
This summer, the publication of a New York Times article asking \u201cDo Americans need air conditioning?\u201d touched off a thousand furious social media posts, uniting figures from the feminist writer and critic Roxane Gay (\u201cYou wouldn\u2019t last a summer week in Florida without it. Get a grip\u201d) to the conservative professor and pundit Tom Nichols (\u201cAir conditioning is why we left the caves \u2026 You will get my AC from me when you pry it from my frozen, frosty hands\u201d).
Despite this backlash, there is a reasonable case to be made that we are over-reliant on air conditioning and could cut back. The supposedly ideal indoor temperature has long been determined by air-conditioning engineers, using criteria that suggest pretty much all humans want the same temperature range at all times. The underlying idea is that comfort is objective, and that a building in Jakarta should be the same temperature as one in Boston. In practice, says Leena Thomas, this means that the temperature in most air-conditioned buildings is usually \u201clow-20s plus\/minus one\u201d.
But not everyone has accepted the notion that there is such as thing as the objectively \u201cright\u201d temperature. Studies have suggested that men have different ideal temperatures from women. In offices around the world, \u201cMen toil in their dream temperatures, while women are left to shiver,\u201d argued a 2015 article in the Telegraph, one of many suggesting that the scientific research had simply confirmed something millions of women already knew.
Researchers have also shown that people who live in hotter areas, even for a very short time, are comfortable at higher indoor temperatures. They contend that, whether it is a state of mind or a biological adjustment, human comfort is adaptive, not objective. This is something that seems obvious to many people who live with these temperatures. At a recent conference on air conditioning that I attended in London, an Indian delegate chided the crowd: \u201cIf I can work and function at 30C, you could too \u2013 believe you me.\u201d
Adding to the weight of evidence against the idea of the \u201cideal\u201d temperature, Frederick Rohles, a psychologist and member of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, has conducted studies showing that subjects who were shown a false thermometer displaying a high temperature felt warm, even if the room was cool. \u201cThese are the sorts of things that drive my engineering colleagues crazy,\u201d he wrote in 2007. \u201cComfort is a state of mind!\u201d
Ashok Lall points out that once people are open to the idea that the temperature in a building can change, you can build houses that use air conditioning as a last resort, not a first step. \u201cBut there is no broad culture or regulation underpinning this,\u201d he says. At the moment, it is the deterministic camp that has control of the levers of power \u2013 and their view continues to be reflected in building codes and standards around the world.
How, then, can we get ourselves out of the air-conditioning trap? On the continuum of habits and technologies that we need to reduce or abandon if we are to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis, the air conditioner probably falls somewhere in the middle: harder to reduce than our habit of eating meat five times a week; easier than eliminating the fossil-fuel automobile.
According to Nick Mabey, a former senior civil servant who runs the UK-based climate politics consultancy E3G, air conditioning has \u2013 like many consumer products that are deeply embedded in society and, in aggregate, drive global warming \u2013 escaped the notice of most governments. There is little precedent for top-down regulation. \u201cThere is no department that handles this, there\u2019s no guy you can just go talk to who controls air conditioning,\u201d he says.
The key, Mabey says, is to find the places it can be controlled, and begin the push there. He is supporting a UN programme that aims to improve the efficiency \u2013 and thus reduce the emissions \u2013 of all air conditioners sold worldwide. It falls under the unglamorous label of consumer standards. Currently, the average air conditioner on the market is about half as efficient as the best available unit. Closing that gap even a little bit would take a big chunk out of future emissions.
At the local level, some progress is being made. The New York City council recently passed far-reaching legislation requiring all large buildings in the city to reduce their overall emissions by 40% by 2030, with a goal of 80% by 2050, backed with hefty fines for offenders. Costa Constantinides, the city council member spearheading the legislation, says it is \u201cthe largest carbon-emissions reduction ever mandated by any city, anywhere\u201d. The Los Angeles mayor\u2019s office is working on similar plans, to make all buildings net-zero carbon by 2050.
Other cities are taking even more direct action. In the mid-1980s, Geneva, which has a warmer climate than much of the US, the local government banned the installation of air conditioning except by special permission. This approach is relatively common across Switzerland and, as a result, air conditioning accounts for less than 2% of all electricity used. The Swiss don\u2019t appear to miss air conditioning too much \u2013 its absence is rarely discussed, and they have largely learned to do without.
In countries where air conditioning is still relatively new, an immense opportunity exists to find alternatives before it becomes a way of life. The aim, in the words of Thomas, should be to avoid \u201cthe worst of the west\u201d. Recently, the Indian government adopted recommendations by Thomas, Rawal and others into its countrywide national residential building code (\u201can immensely powerful document\u201d says Rawal). It allows higher indoor temperatures based on Indian field studies \u2013 Indian levels of comfort \u2013 and notes the \u201cgrowing prevalence\u201d of buildings that use air conditioning as a technology of last resort.
Cutting down on air conditioning doesn\u2019t mean leaving modernity behind, but it does require facing up to some of its consequences. \u201cIt\u2019s not a matter of going back to the past. But before, people knew how to work with the climate,\u201d says Ken Yeang. \u201cAir conditioning became a way to control it, and it was no longer a concern. No one saw the consequences. People see them now.\u201d
Excerpted from https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2019\/aug\/29\/the-air-conditioning-trap-how-cold-air-is-heating-the-world<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"