Air Conditioning Is Boiling the Earth and Making Us Weak: An Interview with Author Stan Cox

It hit 95 degrees in Chicago on Monday, making it the hottest Memorial Day in the city's history. The temperature generated a number of heat warnings instructing individuals to avoid the outdoors while staying in air conditioned spaces. Are we now so reliant on climate-controlled environments that we're being warned to avoid leaving them at all costs?

The task of explaining the wider issues associated with air conditioning is a daunting task as the weather gets warmer and warmer. But to truly understand how deeply ingrained HVAC systems are in our culture, one could do worse than take a look at some of the emails that scientist/plant breeder/author Stan Cox received after he wrote an essay in the Washington Post imagining Washington DC without air conditioning. Consider them all sic'ed:

"Hey, Looney-tune lefty, Do you really think we would be better off living like the Indians of the 1850s? Go pray to your goddess Mother earth and leave us alone," one reader wrote. "You are an anti-American and should move to another country. You are the likes of a criminal for your article on A/C. If you don't like it here move to Russia. I am sure they will take you and your kind," said another. "Apparently none of these Yankee/Liberals/whatever have EVER spent ANY time in the SOUTH at all! I still think it's the stupidiest article I've ever read and I can't believe the editor let this garbage slip by!" one wrote, and then there's my personal favorite, "I'd much rather they drill for more oil in the Gulf than hitch bicycles to low yield power generators, and return to a pre-industrial revolution wasteland to placate you hippie morons."

Stan Cox's wonderful book on the subject, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) has just been released in paperback by New Press and to ignore the arguments it makes would be a grave mistake. He was kind of enough to answer some of my questions about the dark side of thermal comfort.

Let's start with the basics. I don't think many Americans understand why air conditioning is detrimental to the earth's atmosphere and their health. Could you explain why we should be concerned by it?

There are many reasons to rethink our increasing dependence on air conditioning. If climate disruption were the only problem, I don't think the subject would have warranted a whole book. But what you might call the headline issue with air conditioning is indeed its greenhouse impact and the vicious circle that results: cooling the indoors today means heating the outdoors of tomorrow and an even greater need for indoor cooling. That raises a sort of philosophical question: when can we say the Earth's getting too hot for air conditioning?

Almost all cooling of buildings is powered by electricity, most of which is generated using fossil fuels. Automobile air conditioning, when running, increases gasoline or diesel fuel consumption by 20 percent, on average. And all current forms of air conditioning use refrigerants that are potent greenhouse gases. In the United States, fuel-burning and refrigerant leakage caused by air conditioning have a combined impact on the atmosphere equal to that of 450 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, based on EPA figures. That's more than is caused by heating, about the same as the total impact of agriculture, and about one-third that of all industrial production.

Of course, in producing warmth, food, and other goods, and in getting from place to place, we have been generating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases for centuries. But air conditioning emissions have grown from almost nothing to become a major contributor in only about sixty years. What started out as a luxury is now, like warmth and food, declared to be a necessity. In just twelve years, from 1993 to 2005, electricity consumption for residential air conditioning in the United States doubled. The Department of Energy's 2009 consumption figures for air conditioning are due out any day now, and they will almost certainly show another big leap, because the number of air conditioned homes has continued to rise—to 100 million today—and, it seems, each summer is hotter than the one before.

We can't expect improved energy efficiency to solve the problem. Between 1993 and 2005, the energy efficiency of air conditioning systems being used in American homes improved by an impressive 28 percent, but over the same period, energy consumption by the average air conditioned household increased 37 percent. That was because houses grew larger, summers became hotter, and more people switched from room units to central air. And air conditioning totally swamps out our renewable energy production, consuming five times as much electricity as is generated by all solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass sources combined.

Are there statistics regarding how much the United States uses air conditioning versus how much other countries do? How do these stats break down and what do they tell us?

In the 34 high-income countries of the OECD, about half of households now have air conditioning. It's still not heavily used across Europe as a whole, but it is expanding rapidly in Italy, Spain, and the rest of southern Europe and everywhere in the commercial sector there. Automobile air conditioning was rare in Europe before 2000. But today, more than two-thirds of new cars are air-equipped and 95 percent are projected to have it by 2020. Adoption of air conditioning is blamed for European car manufacturers' failure to meet voluntary greenhouse reduction targets for the 1998–2008 decade.

About one quarter of Japan's residential electricity consumption is for air conditioning, compared with 18 to 20 percent in America. (Note that the consumption figures are computed nationwide on a calendar-year basis year-round use. In warmer regions of both countries and especially in summer, cooling is accounting for the majority of electricity use.)

Between 1997 and 2007, the number of Chinese households owning air conditioning units tripled, with the number of units sold reaching more than 20 million annually. Adoption seems to have accelerated since then, with the government having offered incentives to buy. In India, energy use by air conditioning is expected to increase by more than 1000 percent by the 2020s. Already, fully 40 percent of all electricity consumption in the city of Mumbai goes for air-conditioning.

But the world's third most populous country, the United States, is still number-one in air conditioning use. There are other nations that may be more intensively cooled—Singapore, some of the Persian Gulf nations—but nowhere is the overall impact of air conditioning on resource use and climate greater than it is in America.

In the book your criticism of air conditioning goes beyond the environment. Could you talk a bit about the other ways you believe it has impacted our culture and day-to-day lives?

I was born in Georgia just as air conditioning was starting to catch on. We didn't have it at home until I was twelve years old. The South used to be a largely outdoor society, with a thriving "front porch culture," and everywhere, children would gaze out through their classrooms' open windows in May, dreaming of the three months of outdoor exploration that lay ahead. Now, as has been well-documented, American life has moved largely indoors. Everywhere, year-round, it might as well be the dead of winter.

People rightly point to electronic entertainment and communications as a big factor here, but in the crucial summer months when both children and adults once benefited most from being outdoors, the habituation to cool, still, dry air has been a more important force in my opinion. After all, the emergence of digital devices that can be used anywhere has not drawn millions out to sit under shade trees. Some of the most serious results have included a weakening of heat tolerance—both physical and mental—and, among children, a problem that has unofficially been labeled "nature deficit disorder."

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Air-conditioning has been implicated in the obesity epidemic, not only because of the more sedentary indoor lifestyle, but also because we tend to have bigger appetites and slower metabolism under climate-controlled conditions. There is evidence that living almost constantly in an air conditioned environment can disrupt the endocrine system.

Then there is the tendency of parents to keep allergy- and asthma-prone kids indoors, away from pollen and dust in spring and summer, while at the same time the incidence of those conditions continues to increase dramatically in America. A hypothesis increasingly accepted by researchers says that the immune systems of allergy and asthma victims have been disoriented in part by insufficient childhood exposure to friendly outdoor bacteria, fungi, and nematodes. Kids are not going out to play enough in the warm months, not climbing trees or making mud pies, and not getting enough exposure to those organisms.

Our work life, of course, has been transformed. The complaint I have heard more than almost any other since Losing Our Cool was published is from people who are tired of taking a sweater or space heater with them to work in July. And would the working people of American cities ever have accepted the nightmare of long commutes on traffic-choked freeways and streets—a problem that reaches its worst in the sprawl of Sun Belt cities—without air conditioned cars? What are some alternative cooling methods people should embrace this summer instead of blasting air-conditioning?

The fact that we have built the twenty-first-century world on the assumption of lavish air conditioning means that it will not be quite as easy to stay comfortable with natural cooling as it was in the world of 1955. But the old reliable approaches still work. Those include creating shade, moving air across the body from a breeze or a fan, drawing cooler night air into the house and pushing warmer air out as with a whole-house fan, keeping the water coming (down the hatch or on the skin), and, on a hot mid-afternoon, going to the basement if you have one. We should start immediately to construct homes and commercial buildings once again for natural ventilation.

Only a very small portion of the energy expended by a central air conditioning system goes to removing excess heat from our bodies. We should put more emphasis, as do some other countries, on people-cooling rather than concrete, wood, metal, and empty-space cooling. People-cooling is the aim of the practices I just mentioned. Also, the much-reviled window or room air conditioner, while less efficient than central air per unit of cooling, consumes much less energy if used only when it's really hot, only when the space is occupied. There are some cooling devices being advertised as being miraculously energy-efficient, but they are unlikely to save as much energy as expected if we continue to adhere to industrial definitions of comfort.

This is, obviously, a tough argument to kick to people while the summers get hotter and hotter. What do you think an effective strategy is for changing something that, as you write, has become a staple of our existence?

I think the most important thermostat to be adjusted is our own internal one. A couple of years ago during the big East Coast heat wave, I wrote what I thought was an innocent essay about life in an imaginary city of Washington, D.C. without air conditioning, and I was deluged with bitter, hostile comments and emails. Many of them could be paraphrased as saying, "This is America, and in America we have the power to use as much energy as we can get our hands on, and we can always get more. And it's our absolute right to do so." Several people said they were responding to my piece by turning their office thermostats lower.

There seems to be an idea out there that having ample industrially-produced energy at one's fingertips is a sign of great personal and national strength. But our heavy dependence on that energy (no matter whether we produce it here or grab it from some other country) is, in my view, not a sign of power but a symptom of a dangerously fragile society. I wanted to ask those who wrote me if they were really such tough guys—or if we as a society can really be all that tough—if we can't even tolerate some summer heat.

The "adaptive model of comfort"—which says that we don't have a fixed thermal comfort range but that it adjusts to the temperatures we've recently experienced—has been demonstrated experimentally and is widely accepted. If we can somehow break the cycle that leads from cooling to reduced heat tolerance to the need for more cooling, we can wean ourselves from the refrigerated environment. But getting through the withdrawal period, both personally and as a society, will be the hard part.

There are many other adjustments that need to be made in our overall consumption patterns, and indoor climate will have to be part of that larger transition. Eventually, we will have to set firm overall limits on total, society-wide resource consumption and ecological damage, and then decide collectively how to ensure that we all have access to our fair share, given those limits. That's why the book I'm working on now will be about the past, present, and future of rationing.

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