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
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.
no fucking reason
they need to prove that their pilots are ready and willing, to ensure their threats have weight
I mean, in the end, sure. But in a very concrete way, those threats are what keep the colonies pacified.
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.
They're gonna clown on us with nationwide hsr, massive EV adoption and infrastructure and fusion
The enlightened west is about to look like the old west
The nord stream explosion is how many hours of household AC unit at max setting?
How long before liberals blame me and my central AC for all climate change?
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
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/41i705
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.
Uhhh...literally who is shitting on people for heating/cooling their homes? I've heard a lot of fuckery about the south, but never have I heard someone complain they use too much AC lmao
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.
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.
No, disabled and chronically ill people were protesting plastic straw bans because plastic straws are an important accessibility tool. Plastic straws help disabled people who have poor motor control, have chewing or swallowing issues, cannot lift cups to their lips, etc. Here's a good Alice Wong article on it.
But the microplastics! I shout, wearing a pound of plastic clothing that gets agitated in hot water, soap and detergent after every use
Easy simply rarely wash your clothes like I do. I probably do laundry 8 times per year. I just have a bushel of underwear and usually only really need to change it 3 times per week. I don't smell or have any hygiene issues. I am somewhat overweight and physically active too.
I also wear a lot of natural fibers bc I am afraid of the plastic lol.
In older times people would wear underclothes because washing your clothes would ruin them too quickly.
There has always been a deep link between "the ableist semi-eugenics crunchy just go natural no chemicals" crowd and environmentalism.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
My mom is! Both of her parents were professors at Wuhan University. My dad's side of the family is from Nanyang, Henan.
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.
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
So I agree with many of you that we should reduce our reliance on AC for cooling through passive cooling methods, but it really isn't that easy. Where I live it can be 30-35 plus humidity (so 40-45 in the summer) which is hot enough to kill the vulnerable, and due to the high humidity, makes many passive cooling options not work all that great. Especially when it doesn't cool down at night anymore (thanks Obama).
Then, in the winter it's regularly -10, to -20. So some passive cooling no longer works to your benefit.
Realistically there needs to be design considerations for each building, as well as the design of cities/towns/etc., that minimizes all kinds of consumption by leveraging the local climate, geography, flora, as well as transportation related consumption (i.e. use ideas like 5 minute cities to make living less consumptive and car optional).
But none of these things will realistically happen on any meaningful scale until the profit motive is removed from the real estate industry.
Especially when it doesn't cool down at night anymore
This is the part that gets me, I primarily use fans but in the peak of summer my apartment can regularly reach 40 no problem, so I'll run a small window unit AC for a bit if I'm home to take the edge off
At night I usually use fans, with a big double fan doing exhaust and intake to compensate for the fact this place wasn't built for air flow, but even then this place usually deals with 3 months worth of 30-40 days and 25-30 nights, with humidity never breaking
Never used to be that way, that's why these places were designed to trap heat, but thanks to climate change, we're fucked
One thing I didn't mention was using heat pumps for ac/heat. They are very efficient and should be a sort of support cooling/heating system for when the passive options are not quite enough.
i'll keep throwing away 10% of my wage on power bills.
