The debate around air-conditioning is 'heating up':

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It started with the pope. In his recent encyclical, Laudato Si’, he singled out air conditioning as a particularly good example of wasteful habits and excessive consumption that overcome our better natures:

People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more. A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning.

Now, it seems to be open season on air conditioning. From a raging Facebook debate over an article that claims that air conditioning is an oppressive tool of the patriarchy to an article in the Washington Post that calls the American use of air conditioning an “addiction” and compares it unfavorably to the European willingness to sweat through the heat of summer, air conditioning is under attack. So I want to defend it.

Understand that when I defend air conditioning, I do so as something of a reluctant proponent. I grew up in the Midwest, and I have always loved sitting on the screened-in porch, rocking on the porch swing, drinking a glass of something cold. I worked in Key West during the summer after my sophomore year of college, lived in an apartment with no air conditioning, and discovered the enormous value of ceiling fans. A lazy, hot summer day can be a real pleasure.

However, let’s not kid ourselves. There were frequent nights in my childhood when it was just too hot to sleep, and the entire family would hunker down in the one air-conditioned room of the house — my father’s attic study — to cool off at night. When we moved from that house to a place that had central air, none of us complained.

And after my recent article on home canning, my friend Kathryn wrote to say,

When I was growing up in the Deep South, everybody I knew had a garden, shelled beans and peas, and canned. It could have been an Olympic event. What I remember most — besides how good the food was — is how hot it was, all those hours spent over huge pots of boiling something or other on the stove in a house with no air conditioning.

There’s a lot to be said for being able to cook in comfort and to enjoy the screened-in porch by choice rather than necessity. Making your family more comfortable is one of the great advantages of an increasingly wealthy society, after all.

Making your family more comfortable is one of the great advantages of an increasingly wealthy society.

So when I read that the US Department of Energy says that you can save about 11 percent on your electric bill by raising the thermostat from 72 to 77 degrees, mostly I want to invite the Department of Energy to come over to my 1929 bungalow and see if they can get any sleep in my refinished attic bedroom when the thermostat is set to 77 degrees, but the room temperature is a cozy 80-something.

And when I read Petula Dvorak arguing that air conditioning is a tool of sexism because “all these women [are freezing] who actually dress for the season — linens, sundresses, flowy silk shirts, short-sleeve tops — changing their wardrobes to fit the sweltering temperatures around them. … And then there are the men, stalwart in their business armor, manipulating their environment for their own comfort, heaven forbid they make any adjustments in what they wear,” mostly I want to ask her if she’s read the dress codes for most professional offices. In my office, women can wear sleeveless tops and open-toed shoes in the summer. Men have to wear a jacket and tie. Air conditioning isn’t sexist. Modern dress codes very well might be.

But arguments based on nostalgia or gender are mostly easily dismissed. Moral arguments, like those made by Pope Francis or by those who are concerned about the environmental and energy impact of air conditioning, are more serious and require real attention.

Is it immoral to use air conditioning?

Pope Francis certainly suggests it is. And the article in the Washington Post that compares US and European air conditioning use agrees, suggesting that the United States prefers the short-term benefits of air conditioning over the long-term dangers of potential global warming — and that our air conditioning use “will make it harder for the US to ask other countries to continue to abstain from using it to save energy.” We are meant to be deeply concerned about the global environmental impact as countries like India, Indonesia, and Brazil become wealthy enough to afford widespread air conditioning. We are meant to set a good example.

But two months before the Washington Post worried that the United States has made it difficult to persuade India not to use air conditioning, 2,500 Indians died in one of the worst heat waves in the country’s history. This June, 780 people died in a four-day heat wave in Karachi, Pakistan. And in 2003, a heat wave that spanned Europe killed 70,000. Meanwhile, in the United States, heat causes an average of only 618 deaths per year, and the more than 5,000 North American deaths in the un-air-conditioned days of 1936 remain a grim outlier.

Air conditioning is not immoral. Possessing a technology that can prevent mortality numbers like these and not using it? That’s immoral.

Air conditioning is, for most of us, a small summertime luxury. For others, it is a life-saving necessity. I am sure that it has environmental effects. Benefits always have costs, and there’s no such thing as a free climate-controlled lunch. But rather than addressing those costs by trying to limit the use of air conditioning and by insisting that developing nations not use the technologies that rocketed the developed world to success, perhaps we should be focusing on innovating new kinds of air conditioning that can keep us cool at a lesser cost.

I bet the kids who will invent that technology have already been born. I pray that they do not die in a heat wave before they can share it with us.

The War on Air Conditioning Heats Up | Foundation for Economic Education

The war on air conditioning: Which side are you on?

by Sarah Folsland | July 20, 2015

The cultural debate about if air conditioning is good or evil is heating up.

Key Points

We’re at war. A war on air conditioning.
The debate on if AC is good or evil misses the point that we should all use energy efficiently.
Whether you’re heating your home, or cooling it, make sure to do it right to save energy and money.

I grew up without air conditioning in our house (yes, cue the violins). We’d open windows, run fans and kick off the blankets. Even in college, our dorm rooms and eventually my sorority house lacked cooling. So sometimes now, as I set my home thermostat on hot days to a nice cool temperature, I feel a little pang of guilt. Surely I’m wasting energy and squandering money on an unnecessary luxury, not to mention hurting the Earth with my indulgent 72 degrees.

The cultural debate about if air conditioning is good or evil is heating up. The New York Times recently published an editorial about why America is so over-conditioned. The article suggests that “being able to make people feel cold in the summer is a sign of power and prestige.”

OK, I get it. Air conditioning is a luxury. I was right to feel so guilty. Definitely need to turn off my energy-sucking, pollution-creating evil box.

But then I looked into what the other side is saying in the war on air conditioning. Slate magazine noted that America uses about a fourth as much energy on cooling as it does on heating (40.4 million British thermal units on home heating compared to 9.3 BTUs on home cooling). The article argues that it’s more efficient to air condition homes in Florida than it is to warm the ones in Minnesota. This side of the debate notes that labeling air conditioning as evil and home heating as good is a trendy way to appear like you care about the Earth but misses the point that we all use a whole lot of energy.

Air conditioning and home heating both save lives. Both make life more livable during extreme temperatures. And yes, both use a lot of energy.

As with most things in life, the answer seems to be balance. Getting rid of either of these modern conveniences doesn’t make sense. Instead, we can use them with a little more common sense.

Make sure you’re heating and cooling efficiently. Here are tips to keep your AC tuned up, and here are some to keep your furnace in tip top efficiently-running shape.

The war on air conditioning: Which side are you on? | Keeping Energy Affordable

Hot and Bothered

Air conditioning isn’t bad for you or even (relatively) for the planet.

By Daniel Engber

NYC Heatwave — AC isn’t just about one’s social status and affiliation; it’s a matter of public health: Heat waves kill at least as readily as cold, causing hundreds of deaths every year in the U.S.

“Why is America so over air-conditioned?” asks the New York Times in last weekend’s Sunday Review. The article’s premise will be familiar to certain members of the paper’s demographic, for whom it’s self-evident that window units are not so much a source of comfort as a sign of gross indulgence. These people love to hate AC, and they drive me nuts.

Air conditioning energy: AC saves lives and causes less climate change than heating.

How air conditioning is actually making us hotter

By Maddie Oatman on 12 Aug 2015 10 comments

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

We’re just reaching the hottest part of the summer, but already much ink has been spilled over air conditioning. Recent New York Times articles wondered why the United States is so “over air-conditioned,” with its frigid office buildings andarchaic cooling calculations that make work unbearable for many women, not to mention terrible for the environment. Yet in a series of essays for Slate, writer David Engber has argued that the case against AC is overhyped; Americans still spend more energy heating their houses than cooling them.

But elsewhere in the world — in crowded countries where heating isn’t necessary — air conditioning markets are just warming up. In late April, the Indian subsidiary of the Japanese air conditioning manufacturer Daikin Industries announced plans to open its second plant in the subcontinent, double production, and expand its existing stock of 200 showrooms to 350 by the end of 2015. India isn’t the only place where AC is all the rage. As climate change nudges global temperatures upward, incomes are also rising, meaning millions more people can afford to beat the heat. Sales of home and commercial air conditioners have doubled in China over the past five years, with 64 million units sold in 2013 alone.

The advent of AC in those countries will do more than simply make companies like Daikin rich. Here in the U.S., air conditioning has influenced where people settle. Over the past 80 years, hordes of Americans migrated south and west to cities like Miami and Phoenix, where AC made broiling conditions bearable; in turn, the growth of these Sun Belt communities ratcheted up the demand for cooling. These days, almost 90 percent of American households have air conditioning. We spend $11 billion on cooling each year and release roughly 100 million tons of carbon dioxide in the process — the same as 19 million cars.

By contrast, in Mexico, only 13 percent of households have AC. But in a recent study, Lucas Davis, an associate professor at the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, predicts that the country’s rising per capita income will mean more than two-thirds of Mexican homes will have it by 2100 — creating annual emissions equivalent to 4.4 million new cars. Across the globe, Davis predicts, demand for cooling will put more strain on electrical grids, causing shortages and price spikes along with more pollution.

In the United States, power companies fire up “peaker plants” to create extra electricity on hot summer days. And these plants are often dirtier than the usual facilities, leading to a vicious cycle: More emissions means more global warming, which means more appetite for cooling. One 2009 study predicted that by 2100, heating and cooling will account for 12 percent of global carbon emissions — but because of climate change, demand for heating will have shrunk by 34 percent, while demand for cooling will have grown by 72 percent. More energy-efficient equipment can mitigate some of that, but experts estimate these gains will be more than offset by the overall increase in air conditioning.

Still, it’s unrealistic — and unfair — to demand that the world’s rising economies forsake a luxury the more affluent have enjoyed for decades. Not to mention that during heatwaves, lack of air conditioning can kill, with the greatest danger among the elderly, poor, and people of color: A 2013 UC-Berkeley study found that in the United States, Hispanics were 21 percent more likely and African Americans 52 percent more likely than their white counterparts to live in heat islands — urban neighborhoods where, because of abundant concrete and few trees, temperatures soar.

So what could help keep us cool without further heating the globe? Better design, for starters: For thousands of years, the world’s tropical and desert areas have used passive cooling systems — simple architectural tweaks that minimize a structure’s exposure to heat. Light-colored houses with reflective roofs were the mainstay of South Florida architecture before centralized cooling came along, and these “cool roofs” are back in style: Guidelines for new construction in California, Florida, and Georgia urge commercial buildings to adopt this feature, which studies show can decrease air conditioning bills by 20 percent on average. Sacramento, Calif.,requires that planted foliage shade at least 50 percent of any new parking lot, since surfaces protected by a tree’s canopy transmit less heat. The Japanese cities of Tokyo and Osaka, meanwhile, are testing water-retentive pavements, which absorb and then evaporate moisture to cool the streets.

Design tricks can help at home too. One easy way to reduce your AC use — and your electric bill — is to make sure your house is well insulated and sealed, as seepage accounts for about 30 percent of your cooling system’s energy consumption. One energy company calculated that if you set your thermostat to 78 degrees instead of 72, you’ll save around $100 a summer. Ceiling fans cost as little as 30 cents a month when used eight hours a day, while swamp coolers — which cool the air by drawing it over water — are far more energy efficient in dry climates than traditional air conditioners. And with these tools, you can keep your neighbors more comfortable, as well. Researchers from Arizona State Universityrevealed in a 2014 study that waste heat from air conditioning increased the outside temperature of some areas of Phoenix by nearly 2 degrees F, leading to — you guessed it — yet more demand for AC. Scientists observed a similar effectin Tokyo. How’s that for a burn?

How air conditioning is actually making us hotter | Grist

In sweaty Europe, air conditioning is no way to cope with the heat

Even as summers grow hotter, Europeans shun air conditioning

Open a window, turn on a fan, pull the shades, governments advise

German high-speed trains offer sauna-like heat – and flaming a/c units

In the middle of a heat wave, people seek refuge in Wismar, northern Germany on August 7, 2015. For decades, the use of air conditioning has been a cultural dividing line between the United States and Europe. But European summers appear to be getting hotter. Claudia Himmelreich McClatchy

BY MATTHEW SCHOFIELD

mschofield@mcclatchydc.com

VIENNA

During the recent talks over the Iranian nuclear program, the temperatures outside the ritzy Palais Coburg Hotel, where the talks were taking place, approached 100 degrees.

Inside, where seven cabinet-level leaders from six of the world’s most powerful nations, as well as Iran, were engaged in some of the world’s most delicate diplomatic negotiations, it was even hotter.

“You have no idea what our room is like, said one Western diplomat, who’s not being named because he prefaced his remarks with “if you write this I will kill you.”

“The Coburg Hotel is a lovely hotel,” he added. “But – way off the record – air conditioning is not what they did best.”

Air conditioning may be considered a boon in the United States, making liveable Florida’s tropical summers and cooling the blazing heat that often reaches into the triple digits in Texas or California’s Central Valley. And it may have set off office battles in the United States between men and women over what the proper temperatures should be.

IN GERMANY, THE NUMBER OF DAYS WHEN THE TEMPERATURE EXCEEDED 86 DEGREES USED TO BE 3 OR 4 ANNUALLY. THIRTEEN SUCH DAYS ARE FORECAST FOR THIS MONTH ALONE IN BERLIN.

There are no such disputes in Europe. Europeans abhor the idea of air conditioning, noting, rather smugly, that it’s a huge energy guzzler that helps drive the production of the greenhouse gases blamed for driving global temperatures up.

Travel websites are filled with stories – mostly from women – of how unpleasant the United States is with its artificial cold, and stories are legion of Europeans who return ill.

In uber-green Germany, a recent government website offered sweating citizens the advice of turning on a fan and only 2 percent of the homes are air conditioned. Still, there are those that wonder if citizens really need to live so uncomfortably. Summers are, after all, getting hotter. Not Texas or Florida hot, but by European standards, sweltering.

THE TEMPERATURE INSIDE THE TRAINS CAN REACH 122 DEGREES PASSENGERS CAN BE LOCKED UP IN SUCH CONDITIONS FOR HOURS.Frank Boehnke, Association of German Rail Users

Germany, you must remember, is not supposed to get hot.

A “hot” day, what the the Germans call a “Hitzetag,” officially is any day when the temperature reaches 86 degrees Farhenheit. A night when the temperature stays above 68 degrees F is known as a “Tropennacht,” meaning “tropical night.” In 1951, which was pretty standard for the years before that, as well, the average number of “hot days” was 3 to 4. Today, in parts of Germany, that’s up to 18. There are 13 forecast this month alone for Berlin, which is usually on the cool side for Germany.

And that history has proved a disaster when it comes to comfort.

Take for example, the trains.

When Germans set up their futuristic looking intercity train system (ironically called ICE), they added air-conditioning that would keep passengers cool, as long as the temperatures outside didn’t soar above 89.6 degrees. In a 2010 report to the German government, the agency that runs the trains admitted there was no plan for temperatures above that.

With more and more days with higher temperatures, ICE trains have gotten a reputation as fast moving broilers. Windows don’t open on high-speed trains.

Frank Boehnke, spokesman for the Association of German Rail Users, a federal consumer group based in Berlin, said passengers wonder how trains that can travel at more than 200 mph can have such outdated air conditioning.

70,000 NUMBER OF EUROPEANS WHO DIED FROM HEAT-RELATED CAUSES DURING THE SUMMER OF 2003.

“We have complaints every year. The temperature inside the trains can reach 122 degrees,” he said. “Passengers can be locked up in such conditions for hours.”

Passengers faint, or get ill. Trains run out of water. Travel can be disrupted nationwide, in a nation that relies on the trains for travel. Boehnke says Deutsche Bahn, the agency that operates the trains, has said the issue will be addressed with the next generation of trains. He said it needs to be dealt with “urgently.”

“With climate change we have to expect more days of extreme temperature in the future,” Boehnke said.

At times, the issue is obvious to all. On Aug. 3, a high-speed train from Berlin to Munich was sitting in the Stuttgart station when one of its overworked air conditioning units burst into flames.

Trains are not the only place in Germany that could use an air conditioning upgrade. The temperature in the transparent cupola above the Bundestag, where the German parliament meets, has reached 104 many times this summer and has been recorded as high as 120. Around Berlin, its new nickname is “Hitzekuppel” or “heat dome” and tourists have passed out after making the climb to it. As such, it’s often been closed during Berlin’s peak tourist season – this week, for example – with officials noting they’re “unsure when it will be open again.”

Hotels either don’t offer air conditioning or it doesn’t work. Even grocery stores are insufferable; entire sections of produce are thrown out for having over-ripened in the extreme temperatures.

THE COBURG HOTEL (IN VIENNA) IS A LOVELY HOTEL. BUT – WAY OFF THE RECORD – AIR CONDITIONING IS NOT WHAT THEY DID BEST.Western diplomat

Paul Becker, vice president of the German weather service, warned last month in a statement that the problem goes beyond mere comfort.

“In the wake of climate change, we expect more, longer and more intense heat waves in Germany in the future,” he said. “If we don’t succeed in adjusting, this could lead to a multiplication of heat related mortality due to coronary heart disease by a factor of 3 to 5 by the end of the century.”

Still, the German government is loathe to recommend more air conditioning. The German Ministry of the Environment this month specifically exempted air conditioning from subsidies provided to adapt to climate change. “Air conditioning is ruled out as it works against the protection of the environment,” it said.

The ministry called air conditioning a good example of a win-lose scenario: those seeking relief from the heat might win, but the environment loses and it leads to more climate change problems in the long run.

But officials also aren’t quite sure what they would suggest if faced with another summer like 2003, when an estimated 70,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes.

In that year, the most infamous example of the cost of not having air-conditioning was seen in Paris, where the French government chastised young families for heading to the cooler coasts during the heat spell and leaving their aging parents to die in their Paris apartments. In first two weeks of August, 14,800 died.

The reactions to that summer were evident among all Europeans, though differed greatly from place to place. In Greece, for instance, the European Union now estimates that 99 percent of households have air-conditioning, surpassing even the estimated 87 percent of Americans with air-conditioning. But while there have been slow, steady climbs since that year in the households with air-conditioning, the percentage of homes in France remains below 5, in Germany below 2 percent and in Austria below 1 percent.

In fact, one of the more obvious signs of the continuing disdain for cooled air in Europe can be found in German law. Reacting to the summer of 2003 and rising temperatures in general, German law was rewritten from requiring businesses to provide a workplace with temperatures below 79 degrees to a requirement that they provide a “reasonable” workplace temperature. Keeping the workplace below 79 wasn’t seen as possible without air conditioning, so the law was changed not to require it.

Niklas Schinerl, an energy expert at Greenpeace, Germany, says the fact that more aren’t rushing towards cooling systems is a positive sign, and shows a commitment to the environment. Still, he acknowledged that even in Switzerland, energy consumption for air conditioning has doubled in the last 10 years. He noted that energy consumption for air conditioning now consumes the equivalent of all the power generated by one of Switzerland’s five nuclear reactors. And that’s expected to rise.

Yet he thinks Europe will hold the line.

“I don’t think the top end is as high for Europe as it is in the United States,” he said. “The number of new houses built to include it will increase, but it won’t go that high. And that’s a good thing for the climate.
”

In sweaty Europe, air conditioning is no way to cope with the heat | McClatchy DC
Europe to America: Your love of air-conditioning is stupid - The Washington Post

Climate change means we can't keep living in glass houses

August 3, 2015 by David Coley, The Conversation

Las Vegas’s glass boxes couldn’t exist without air conditioning. Credit: Bert Kauffman, CC BY

How do we go about designing buildings today for tomorrow's weather? As the world warms and extreme weather becomes more common, sustainable architecture is likely to mean one major casualty: glass.

For decades glass has been everywhere, even in so-called "modern" or "sustainable" architecture such as London's Gherkin. However in energy terms glass is extremely inefficient – it does little but leak heat on cold winter nights and turn buildings into greenhouses on summer days.

For example, the U-value (a measure of how much heat is lost through a given thickness) of triple glazing is around 1.0. However a simple cavity brick wall with a little bit of insulation in it is 0.35 – that is, three times lower – whereas well-insulated wall will have a U-value of just 0.1. So each metre square of glass, even if it is triple glazed, loses ten times as much heat as a wall.

While the climate is changing, so too is the weather. Climate is expressed in terms of long-term averages, whereas the weather is an expression of short-term events – and the weather is predicted to change by much more than our climate. This creates challenges. A 0.5℃ increase in monthly temperature can made a difference to farmers, or the energy used by an air-conditioning system, but a peak temperature of 38℃ or a vicious cold snap can be far more serious. Buildings are designed to handle extremes, not just averages.

Architects and building engineers around the world are now having to struggle with this issue, especially since buildings last so long. At Bath we have recently been awarded a grant to look at long-term weather forecasting and how building design will have to change. After all, you can't move buildings to a better climate.

One obvious possibility, for UK designers at least, is that they pick a place where the weather currently is similar to what the Met Office suggests the UK will have in 2100, and simply put up buildings like the ones they have there.

The problem is this ignores the low-carbon agenda. Many hot countries have spent the past 30 years designing buildings similar to those found in more temperate countries, while leaving enough space for monster air-conditioning systems. The air-conditioned skyscrapers in Las Vegas and Dubai, for instance, look just like buildings you might see in London or Boston, despite being built in the middle of a desert.

As an experiment, type "Dubai Buildings" into Google images and take a look at what has been built and, more worryingly, artist's impressions of what is on the drawing board. You can even see this inefficiency in cultures that one might expect more of, for example the famous energy-guzzling glass towers of Vancouver.

Buildings will have to be simplified. Heating, lighting, energy supply, air con, escalators, IT networks and so on – all these "building services" will have to be stripped right back. Those services which do remain must use almost no energy – and possibly generate the energy they require on site.

Cutting back on glass would be an easy win. Windows need to be sized, not glorified, and sized for a purpose: the view, or to provide natural light or air. Windows also need to be shaded. Many would argue that we need to re-invent the window, or the building. We need to build buildings with windows, rather than buildings that are one big window.

Maybe we should look to the Mediterranean. People have mainly lived in countries such as Greece, for example, without air-conditioning – and it is true that such heavyweight, thick-walled buildings with small openings are capable of moderating external conditions very well.

However they don't offer the climate control we are used to, especially if you pack them with people and computers. The people of the Mediterranean also had generations to adapt themselves and their working arrangements to fit with the climate. We don't have this luxury: the weather is changing too fast.

We have yet to invent architecture ready for whatever happens to the climate, but it is clear that we need to take lessons from the past – and from other cultures. We can't simply air-condition our way through global warming.