William Saletan: Earth is fast becoming the planet of the indoor people
By WILLIAM SALETAN
RECORD-SHATTERING temperatures, scores of Americans dead. By summer's end, the toll will be in the hundreds. It's not as bad as 2003, when a heat wave killed more than 35,000 people in Europe. But according to global-warming forecasts, within 40 years, every other summer will be like that one.
Thank goodness for air conditioning. To keep old folks alive, cities from Washington to Los Angeles are opening artificially cooled buildings to the public.
Meanwhile, people are lining up to buy window units. According to the Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute, shipments of air conditioners and heat pumps have tripled over the past three decades.
The percentage of single-family homes built with central air has gone from 36 to 87. The percentage of cars built with air conditioning has risen from 61 to 98. In 1970, 42 percent of occupied mobile homes had it. By 2003, that percentage had more than doubled.
Air conditioning takes indoor heat and pushes it outdoors. To do this, it uses energy, which increases production of greenhouse gases, which warm the atmosphere. From a cooling standpoint, the first transaction is a wash, and the second is a loss. We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable.
We use about one-sixth of our electricity to cool ourselves. That's more than the total electricity consumption of India, a country whose population exceeds 1 billion. To get the electricity, we burn oil and coal. We also run air conditioners in our cars, which reduces urban fuel efficiency by up to four miles per gallon, at an annual cost of 7 billion gallons of gasoline.
More burning of oil and coal means more greenhouse gases. Stan Cox, a scientist at the Land Institute, calculates that air-conditioning the average U.S. home requires 3,400 pounds of carbon dioxide production per year. The effects of this are particularly bad at night.
Outdoor air used to cool at night, allowing us to recover from the day's heat. Now it doesn't. To fuel our air conditioning, we're destroying nature's.
The hotter it gets, the more energy we burn. In 1981, one in three American households with central air used it all summer long. By 1997, more than half did. Countries once cooled by outdoor air now cool themselves. In Britain, 75 percent of new cars have air conditioning. In Canada, energy consumption for residential cooling has doubled in 10 years, and half the homes now have central air or window units. Kuujjuaq, an Eskimo village 1,000 miles north of Montreal, just bought 10 air conditioners.
Instead of fixing the outdoors, we're trying to escape it. On every street in my neighborhood, people have torn down ordinary houses and put up giant air-conditioned boxes that extend as far as possible toward the property line. They've lost yards and windows, but that's the whole idea.
Outdoor space is too hard to control, so we're replacing it with indoor space. From 1991 to 2005, the median lot size of single-family houses sold in the United States shrank by 9 percent, but the median indoor square footage increased by 18 percent.
Two months ago, my wife and I saw Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." Walking out of the air-conditioned theater, we agonized over what we could do to fight global warming. The conversation ended when we realized that our most useful contribution would be to cancel our home renovation. Wrapping ourselves in a climate-controlled bubble can't make global warming less true. But in the short run, it can make it a lot less inconvenient.
That's the problem in Washington today. Policymakers aren't facing global warming, because they aren't feeling it. They gave themselves air conditioning in the 1920s and '30s, long before the public got it. White House meetings and congressional hearings on climate change are doomed as soon as the thermostats are set.
White House press secretary Tony Snow assured correspondents this month that their briefing room would soon be renovated. "Gathering from the temperature in this room at this moment, I think everybody agrees that it's probably about time to have a new and updated air-conditioning and heating system," he joked.
But maybe the air-conditioning system we need to fix is the one outdoors. And maybe we won't face that truth till it becomes more inconvenient.
William Saletan covers science and technology for Slate, the online magazine at www.slate.com
unionleader.com |
