https://xcancel.com/nytopinion/status/1829879853165765055
https://archive.ph/lxKBc
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/opinion/heat-wave-air-conditioning-climate-change.html
https://xcancel.com/nytopinion/status/1829879853165765055
https://archive.ph/lxKBc
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/opinion/heat-wave-air-conditioning-climate-change.html
The US uses more electricity for AC than all of Africa uses for existing. Fuck you if you think that your comfort is worth more than the survival of the rest of the world.
AC isn’t why the world is fucked from climate change.
Plus most of that AC usage is probably keeping shit like office buildings and big box stores cool while no one is even there. Not people keeping cool in their own home.
Namerican "every person needs to own a single family home in the suburbs and a car" Lebensraum ideology is why the world is fucked from climate change. If you don't live in shitty cardboard houses built as cheaply as possible you don't need AC
You absolutely still need AC depending on the environment you live in. The most efficient multifamily housing isn’t enough to combat the hot and humid south or just insanely hot areas like the southwest.
While individualist capitalist ideology itself is a large part of the problem, most of those emissions are not from home AC. 69% of emissions in the US are from transportation, industrial use, and agriculture. The remaining 31% is “residential and commercial”, of which 18pp is electricity usage, of which residential AC would likely only be a small portion. Residential heating is likely higher since we still mostly use inefficient methods like gas and resistive rather than heat pumps (aka AC working in reverse).
And that’s not even mentioning the emissions we’ve offset to other countries for manufacturing. Something that definitionally does not include residential AC.
I would invite you to spend 30 minutes in the deep South during August and tell me that AC is a luxury, assuming you haven't already dropped dead from wet bulb conditions.
Shitty cardboard box homes are a major contributor to higher energy usage, yes, but that's not something the overwhelming majority of Americans have any control over even if they own their house. Residential AC still pales in comparison to energy usage by commercial real estate or industry, which contribute far more emissions and are much more relevant to tackle first for handling climate change.
Individual, "consumer action" has almost no power or history of bringing about change, and installs the wrong mindset in people that "if you vote with your dollar things can fundamentally change through non revolutionary means".
for sure. But when the time comes, due to revolution or due to collapse, for the AC to be turned off, that last sentence will still be relevant.
I get it, but this also feels like a "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism so there's no point in me depriving myself of my treats" excuse.
If you live in your average American house that's way to big basically a carbord-box with no insulation sitting in an asphalt heat island, your lifestyle needs to be
I mean the area I live in is pretty humid and we broke 100 degrees fahrenheit during the last heat wave. I think that 30 years ago "just deal with the 89 degree temperature, drink some water" was a reasonable stance but temperatures like this will kill people.
Pretty sure there are literally billions of people living in areas hotter than wherever you life which do not use AC
Plenty of people are now dying from heat waves too. Just because a large part of the world is deprived from proper cooling doesn’t mean it’s not good or valuable. The real issue is the energy generation methods.
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