Turn off your air conditioner

This story was originally covered by PRI’s Here and Now. For more, listen to the audio above.

Comfortable temperatures aren’t fixed. There is a range of temperatures in which people can feel comfortable, depending on what they have experienced in recent days and weeks. One thing is certain, though. “In the age of air conditioning,” author Stan Cox told PRI’s Here and Now, “we have become less heat tolerant, both physically and mentally.”

Air conditioners are nearly ubiquitous in American society, making people less tolerant of heat. Cox, the author of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer), believes “We have built our society to be addicted to air conditioning.”

Air conditioning may seem like a necessity in central Kansas, where Cox lives, since summer temperatures routinely top 100 degrees. But Cox and his family have lived without air conditioning for 10 years. They have a system, but turn it for just one day each year to make sure that it still works.

There is a difference, according to Cox, between temperature control for public health and the wasteful kind of air conditioning use that most people experience every day. Air conditioning has saved lives in heat waves, and that’s undoubtedly good. Cox has a problem with the “more lavish, routine use of air conditioning in much of the rest of our lives when it’s not really needed.”

Not only is air conditioning wasteful and harmful for the environment, it adversely affects society, too. Air conditioning pushes people inside to avoid the heat, rather than outside, where they can enjoy their neighbors and their community. Cox told PRI’s The Takeaway, “It really has caused an estrangement from one another.”

The rest of the world seems to be following the lead of the United States in using more air conditioning, rather than less. According to Cox, “Right now in the city of Mumbai, India, for example, 40 percent of all electricity use in that city is going for air conditioning, and it’s only a small portion of the population that has it.”

Considering how heavily people rely on air conditioners, there would likely be a withdrawal process — like kicking an addiction — if people were to stop using it. Soon, however, people may not have a choice. Cox cautions people:

We’ve taken something that was a luxury not very long ago, and promoted it to a necessity. And some day, maybe not too far in the future, we’re going to have to accepting hard limits on energy and start making choices. And we need to put that on the list of potential cuts when we start cutting our use of resources.

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