2023 was the hottest year on Planet Earth in about 125,000 years. So far 2024 has been hotter still.
So what? It’s boom time for air-conditioning, and air-con is unsustainable unless powered by renewables because it’s so energy-intensive.
- The result is a doom loop: ever higher temperatures outdoors as the price of a liveable indoors.
- A side-effect is overcooling: fleeces in the office in mid-summer.
- Another technology turbo-charging AC is AI, because data centres need cooling too.
History. In the century and a quarter since an engineer named Willis Carrier invented modern air conditioning, about 200 million AC units have been installed in the US, excluding those in cars. That’s nearly two per household.
Geography. As global warming takes hold and urban heat islands intensify, demand for air conditioning is spiralling beyond Carrier’s imagining.
- Globally, 170 million air conditioners were installed last year.
- By the middle of this century there will be a billion AC units in India alone and more than 2 billion worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency.
Is that a good thing? It’s a good business to be in (worth $126 billion last year, rising to an estimated $200 billion in 2030), and it’s good for public health because without AC more and more humans will die of heat exhaustion.
But it can’t go on like this.
- Global energy use for air-conditioning has trebled since 1990.
- Global CO2 emissions from the power used by air-con have trebled, too.
- Asian energy use for the same purpose has quadrupled in the same period.
- In Delhi and Mumbai, AC already accounts for up to 60 per cent of all electricity consumption.
- Three quarters of that power comes from coal, the most carbon-intensive source.
Past comfort. The miracle by which passing hot, humid air through a condenser and a heat exchanger makes it cool enough for cardigans (and, if desired, snow) has transformed life in the US and Southeast Asia.
- AC has enabled Florida’s population to expand from two-thirds that of Arkansas in 1940 to seven times as big now. As Raymond Arsenault wrote in the Journal of Southern History in 1984*: “General Electric has proved a more devastating invader [of the American South] than General Sherman.”
- AC is to a surprising extent responsible for modern Singapore. The first thing its founder did on becoming prime minister was install it in every building used by the civil service. “This,” said Lee Kwan Yew, “was key to public efficiency.”
Present pickle. Conceived when energy was cheap, AC has seduced entire populations into thinking of it as a need when the planet needs people to think of it as a luxury. In the process it has…
- homogenised residential buildings styles across America so that new-builds reject local styles and materials in favour of machines that guarantee life at 22 C (72 F) no matter the season or latitude; and
- saddled cities with glass-walled high-rises that function as greenhouses within the greenhouse effect.
Future pain. The AC doom loop is only going to spin faster.
- In the Middle East a population in indisputable need of AC is set to rise from 350 million to 600 million by mid-century.
- In Europe, only 20 per cent of homes have air conditioning. If that doesn’t change, the record of 62,000 heat-related deaths in 2022 will be surpassed.
- In India, even if the middle class gets AC it will only worsen the urban heat island effect for the poor who still won’t have it.
- In Africa, Big Air-con is just getting started. Barely 8 per cent of homes have AC.
Ways out. Alternatives to always-on AC include rediscovering high ceilings, decent ventilation, shaded verandas and adobe walls. There’s also the thermostat and the humble ceiling fan. Berkeley’s Professor Stefano Schiavon has found that test subjects will voluntarily turn up the dial by 3 degrees if given a sense of control over their environment with an energy-efficient fan.
What’s more… Schiavon says 20 per cent of air-conditioned office workers feel too cold in summer, and they are disproportionately women.
*hat tip Emily Badger, NYT
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