Good article in the Guardian. Will the US and Americans realize how luxurious of a life they live? Will they let go off the over-excessive use of air condition that they have everywhere in their homes, buildings, and cars? Will the adoption of AC in other warm countries such as India be curbed? IN a climate-changing world, AC seems to be the thing that will be the plaster on the wound that will only makes thing worse. It's a long article, but I tried pull out some quotes.
Solutions are simply urban planning and architecture:
On a regular day, New York City demands around 10,000MW every second; during a heatwave, that figure can exceed 13,000MW. "Do the math, whatever that gap is, is the AC," 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. "Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity was going to air conditioning," says John Dulac, an analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA). "These are 'oh shit' moments."
There are just over 1bn single-room air conditioning units in the world right now – 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 – about the same amount as India, the world's third-largest emitter, produces today.
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 – 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, "by the brute application of more air conditioning". As Cooper writes, "Architects, builders and bankers accepted air conditioning first, and consumers were faced with a fait accompli that they merely had to ratify."
Equally essential to the rise of the air conditioner were electric utilities – 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 "load building", after the industry term (load) for the amount of electricity used at any one time. "The 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," says Richard Hirsh, a historian of technology at Virginia Tech.
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's World Trade Center, completed in 1974, had what was then the world's 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. "Our children are raised in an air-conditioned culture," an AC company executive told Time magazine in 1968. "You can't really expect them to live in a home that isn't air conditioned." Over time, the public found they liked air conditioning, and its use continued to climb, reaching 87% of US households by 2009.
Solutions are simply urban planning and architecture:
Lall says that even with affordable housing it is possible to reduce the need for air conditioning by designing carefully. "You balance the sizes of opening, the area of the wall, the thermal properties, and shading, the orientation," he says. But he argues that, in general, developers are not interested. "Even little things like adequate shading and insulation in the rooftop are resisted. The builders don't appear to see any value in this. They want 10- to 20-storey blocks close to one another. That's just how business works now, that's what the cities are forcing us to do. It's all driven by speculation and land value."
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 – centralised, methodical, preceding development – 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. "You see these immense towers go up, and they're already locking the need for air conditioning into the building," 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. "So much damage has been done by those buildings," he says, "I have entirely lost hope in my generation; perhaps the next one can design a rescue mission."
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. "It's no longer a luxury product but a necessity," an executive at the Indian branch of the Japanese air-conditioner manufacturing giant Daikin told the Associated Press last year. "Everyone deserves AC."
This refrain is as familiar in Rajasthan now as it was in the US 70 years ago. Once air conditioning is embedded in people's lives, they tend to want to keep it. But that fact obscures the ways that consumers' 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. "In American hotel rooms," she wrote, "you can decide whether or not to turn on the air conditioning (that is your business), but you cannot open the window."
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't appear to miss air conditioning too much – 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 "the worst of the west". Recently, the Indian government adopted recommendations by Thomas, Rawal and others into its countrywide national residential building code ("an immensely powerful document" says Rawal). It allows higher indoor temperatures based on Indian field studies – Indian levels of comfort – and notes the "growing prevalence" of buildings that use air conditioning as a technology of last resort.
Cutting down on air conditioning doesn't mean leaving modernity behind, but it does require facing up to some of its consequences. "It's not a matter of going back to the past. But before, people knew how to work with the climate," says Ken Yeang. "Air conditioning became a way to control it, and it was no longer a concern. No one saw the consequences. People see them now."
