i see theres actually discourse on this. Lemme lay it out then.
Yes your all right AC use can be mitigated by proper building techniques. it does cause lots of emissions. its also necessary for many people and places regardless. Its also way over used in western society.
None of that matters. The specifics of when to use or not use AC arent relevant right now because under capitalism your never gonna get houses built better en masse, and the only thing thats gonna be considered is how can we build houses even cheaper to make more profit and sell more AC units?
This is a discussion we can have all day and its never gonna matter.
The only thing worth discussing here is the fact that currently the powers that be want to sell you a home that needs AC and has AC and then shame you for using the damn thing.
The house in renting has shared spaces upstairs and living quarters downstairs and gd vaulted ceilings and the asshole never who designed it never considered putting some kind of venting in the ceiling upstairs to just suck the hot air out. I don’t even understand it, it’s just so efficient, but maybe I’m underestimating how bad leaks can form from that kind of venting
You all know that air conditioning is a crucial accessibility issue, right? Many chronic illnesses/disabilities cause heat intolerance. While we should be working on finding greener solutions, telling people to cut out air conditioning from their lives can slide into ableist territory real fast.
And when you point out that if they want to take individual actions, the single best action they can take is going plant based rather than air conditioning, they flip out and tell you that they use paper straw and that’s already a lot
This is the plastic straw nonsense all over again, where the discourse around “reducing impact” always comes around to blame disabled people for having accessibility needs.
If you could get enough Americans to stop using air conditioning to make a difference, you might as well harness your incredibly powerful social movement to skip ahead and build a global electricity grid with enough solar to power AC for all
Anyone who thinks that air conditioning is a “luxury” is forgetting that high temperatures literally kill people. The idea that hundreds of millions of people in the Global South do not have access to adequate cooling does not mean that air conditioning is a bourgeois luxury, it’s a health hazard and an indication of the disproportionate burden of the effects of climate change. This is why China builds power generators for Global South countries. Also summer temperatures across the world regularly rise above 100 F in many places, I’d like you all to tell my grandparents in Wuhan that they’re killing the planet by having air conditioning on.
Oh shit you’re from Wuhan? I’m in Hankou right now. It’s hot.
My mom is! Both of her parents were professors at Wuhan University. My dad’s side of the family is from Nanyang, Henan.
I refuse to believe people can keep writing and believe this fucking stupid blame shifting shit. Every fucking time things get worse the bottom rung is encouraged to tighten their belts while major corporate polluters and energy hogs go unregulated.
What would be good for the environment? The author is almost there. We need to spend more time outside (building scaffolds)
I’m with you on this. “Stop using AC, adapt to climate change!”
Meanwhile the US air force is flying 10000 planes a day for no fucking reason.
Oh damn it’s almost like using the AC IS me adapting to climate change. It’s so weird that I keep needing to leave the AC low even though it’s Fall now. Hmmmm
Meanwhile air travel is the only practical way to travel in this country. A mode of travel which is unlikely to ever be electrified on any meaningful scale — not to mention the amount of battery waste that would require.
China’s basically solved this problem already with high-speed rail. It doesn’t need batteries because the power is delivered to the track. Far more sustainable.
High speed rail would make sense in the US, too. Like everything between Montana, Texas, and Kentucky is flat. You could build rail lines that are perfectly straight with nothing in the way you’d have to make a turn to go around (causing you to slow down). Such a line could probably hit 300 mph. If the line was fron LA to NYC, it could make that trip in about 9 hours (probably not because eventually you have to go around the Rockies, Appalachia, and Sierra Nevada).
But no. Let’s continue using shitty tubes passengers get crammed into where we limit how much stuff they can bring and can’t leave their seat except to go to the bathroom.
The nord stream explosion is how many hours of household AC unit at max setting?
A comment from the article:
It is very fashionable from folks in northern climates who routinely heat their homes in the winter to look down on those in those in southern climates that cool their homes in summer. Extreme heat and cold both kill. HVAC systems, heating and cooling, are both used to prevent this and to give comfort. Cooling your house on a 95 degree day to 75 degrees is a 20 degree move. In the north, when it is 30 degrees out, many heat their homes to 65 or 70 degrees, a 35 or 40 degree difference. Asking people to only heat to 50 degrees would be an outrage. Why? Well, because they are not comfortable at that temperature. For some reason using electricity to heat to comfort is considered necessary, but using electricity to cool is wasteful and ruining the climate. I am sure it has nothing to do with a greater percentage of wealthy caucasians living in colder climates and more less wealthy, non-caucasians living in hot climates.
https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/41i6a3
A Japanese commenter’s opinion:
So it is easy for the author to recommend this living in Kansas where I assume there is ample temperature fluctuation (ie. low-mid humidity) to allow evaporative cooling afforded by misting and fans. I am currently in Western Japan. Early morning temperature here is 80F with 80% humidity. Max temp tomorrow will be 93F with 75% humidity. Spending “more time outside” is literally a recipe for heat stroke. While the sentiment is noble to reduce air conditioner use, it really IS a location-dependent option.
How long before liberals blame me and my central AC for all climate change?
Happening in this thread
this is particularly ghoulish as someone who is living in an area that used to not need AC as much in the summer. As areas have gotten much, much hotter than they should be, the idea of not having AC is quickly becoming a nightmare. The only time it would be remotely acceptable to make someone go without cooling here is during the winter and even then it’s more like a cool autumn day than winter should be like. It’s so hot out right now and it’s the beginning of fall. I genuinely don’t believe we’re only seeing 1-2 degrees Celsius of heat increase, the climate here is genuinely shifting towards more tropical temps gradually. Actually if we want humans to survive the next 100 years we should probably shift the majority of our electricity production towards powering AC units and making more efficient forms of it.
imagine if housing developers in the US gave a fuck about literally anything. like if homes weren’t made out of toothpicks and papier mache, and the mold that grows above 65% RH and temps over 85° couldn’t literally eat the structure. or housing developments had to use landscaping strategies and ground coupled heat exchangers. and windcatchers, attic fans, whole house ventilation systems. like if somebody had to do a hardcore climate audit of the location and site/orient/build all of the housing, landscaping and infrastructure to maximize its resilience to extreme temperature swings and optimize comfort.
and if everybody who, like the author, was born in the malarial deep south could get a phd and relocate to bucolic, quiet place like a micropolitan college town/federal experiment station in kansas and have the funds to buy their own home and make all the passive climate moderation and control investments because of course all the contractors, materials, and logistical capacity necessary to do that kind of work are there.
what a fuckin world if the people with all the power and wealth were more interested in using it to build a future than to short flip a return right now.
You do not develop an immunity to heat exhaustion or heat stroke.
We get brownouts and blackouts during summer when the strain on the grid is too much, when fire cuts off power, and our power stations conk out. AC cannot be relied upon, and increasingly so as demand increases and infrastructure worsens. So learning to live without it is an unfortunate reality. Anyone presenting adaptation as a solution and not a necessity is completely off base, however.
Edit: fwiw I don’t have ac, I just sweat for six months of the year
The biggest problem is that pretty much all construction methods and codes in the US have been made with extensive AC in mind. Plenty of places in the world where it gets really hot have developed architecture that mitigates the effects of higher temperatures, like higher ceilings or channeling airflow around central pools, but the US insists on building houses like everywhere is 1950s new jersey. Many houses would be unlivable 6 months of the year without AC. They need to be torn down and replaced with something less energy intensive
They need to be torn down and replaced with something less energy intensive
Tearing down and building new houses would probably cause significantly more carbon emissions within any reasonable time frame.
Yeah, that’s the catch-22. But those buildings are unlivable without ac or heating.
Yeah OK I can’t afford or legally do extensive changes to my apartment
I absolutely would do passive cooling if I could but the building is literally not designed for that if I turn off the air other apartments pump heat into mine
Also I know people that have died from heat stroke here from being outside for longer than an hour
Degrowth will result in less comfort. I swear, Americans will call themselves socialists but become wannabe suburban feudal lords once told they will need to deal with living in 85-90 degree heat. Your level of comfort will and should decrease if you live in the West.
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Because air conditioning uses 14% of all energy produced in the US and so much of that is people wanting to have their homes at 65 degrees or so. The same mindset of wanting to be a tiny king in a giant house is the same mindset that causes Americans to cool and heat their houses an absurd degree. Degrowth will create a less comfortable life, because the American standard of living is unsustainable. The point isn’t making Americans suffer for the sake of making Americans suffer, but rather them suffering is necessary for a better world.
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That includes price buildings yes. It’s not just residential consumption. We’d need to drop American energy consumption by at least half I’d guess because you can’t cleanly change the entire power grid out in a decade. You’d need way less cooling, almost no EVs and individual transport, elimination of the advertising industry, greatly reduced mining among other things. US electricity consumption is split near-evenly between residential, commercial, and industrial and the plurality of residential energy consumption goes to heating and cooling. The electricity consumption of AC is nowhere near negligible and needs to be reduced one way or another.
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85-90 degree heat
It’s 2024, these temperatures in summer would be a delight, but that’s not what we have to deal with. We’re seeing months straight of highs in the high 90s, sometimes breaking triple digits (which will only become more common).
There’s a big difference between using AC to go from 100 to 85-90 than using AC to go from 85-90 to 65. I should elaborate that AC is fine to protect against full on
. I’m against people using AC to go from uncomfortable heat to ~60, not people going from dangerous heat to uncomfortable heat.Why is it acceptable for people to heat from -40°F to 70°F (a 110°F difference) but not acceptable for people to cool from 110°F to 80°F (a 30°F difference)? Do you also argue that people in blizzards should only heat just above freezing?
I’m moving to Antarctica if i can’t use my AC. I sweat as soon as it hits 20° and i don’t care to be called tough or what have you so put me in the fridge thanks
But I get my electricity from the Three Gorges, I’m pretty sure running the AC for a month here has less impact on the environment than the server the NYTimes is hosting that Opinion piece on.
Why doesn’t your government build a huge ass hydroelectric dam to provide cheap, green energy for your citizens?
the wokes don’t understand that hydro dams slow down the earth’s rotation. basic action and reaction people. enough dams and there will be no day or night!!!
looks at Hoover dam
It’s empty tho
