Anecdote follows: So there I was. 2 days into a stay in Kuwait and trying to get some rest. During the day it got up to 130F outside, but it cooled down some at night. The AC in the tents was doing its best, and I was shivering so much I needed to pull out my sleeping bag to get to sleep. I got up and checked the thermometer on the side of the tent, and the air temperature was still 90, but since it was 40 degrees colder than I was during the day, it felt cold.
We've passed the point where individual laborers typically benefit from the huge productivity gains of their employers, so maybe its time to pay back the increased overall efficiency with fewer labor hours and more free time for the same pay? I think we've passed scarcity in most labor markets, too, but if not we're dangerously close, and halving the total labor hours per person in a year, but doubling the total labor force might be a good idea. Most companies could afford it, even if they would loudly complain about it. That sort of increase in bandwidth of pay would also do well for the economy.
I've been joking a lot lately that maybe a/c was a bad idea for the human spirit. It deprived us from natural excuses to need afternoon siestas and summers off for better overall productivity, and it helped industrialization believe people were replaceable parts in machines that could run 40 hour work weeks every single week of the year.
That said, I couldn't imagine someone actually running a campaign with a platform of abolishing a/c in white collar office buildings, but it is fun/amusing to imagine. It's an interesting thought experiment: do we really need a/c to get work done?
Part of the reason I started joking that a/c was a mistake was a friend noted how much of the drama of Southern US literature surrounds hot weather and commenting on such. There was an idea that all of the "best plays" such as Gone With the Wind, some of August Wilson's plays, and seemingly the majority of Tennessee Williams' plays, devote _a lot_ of the dialog to just how hot it is. That often leads to character's own tensions and dramas boiling out. It shows up in a lot of books at the time too, like Fitzgerald's works (The Great Gatsby). That lead to me joking that maybe a/c has lead to a great suppression of our emotions and a lack of good drama in our lives. It's obviously more a correlation in those works than a causation, but in its own way an amusing thought experiment in the different tempos of life in such places before and after a/c.
The people need AC, not the buildings themselves.
And I think that's something some commenters are missing: no one is asking India to turn off the A/C. But maybe we don't need to replicate the grocer's freezer section in my office just because the weather finally turned nice.
Seattle has the lowest percentage of households with air conditioning of any of the metro areas included in the Census Bureau's American Housing Survey. The only place almost as low is San Francisco. Here are the five lowest:
33.7% Seattle
36.3% San Francisco
69.9% Portland
72.8% Los Angeles
79.4% Denver
99.5% New Orleans
99.3% Tampa
99.3% Austin
99.3% Las Vegas
99.2% Kansas City
I had a number of people recommend certain Seattle suburbs to me (particularly Bellevue and Renton), and it was towards the top of my list for a while... until some friends of mine who lived there told me that very few homes have central AC. That was an immediate nope. Crossed the whole state off my list.
I cannot tolerate any level of heat. I keep my AC at 60°F or below all the time, and I blast it even in winter. The only time I ever turn my AC off is when it's below freezing out.
On a side note, should Texas revive that bill next year and it passes, I've decided I'm moving to Las Vegas.
I do appreciate A/C in offices however, since I run on the hot side and can always put on clothes rather than take them off. I would prefer an office with an opening window next to some trees (I had that in Sieg hall a long time ago), but that would screw up facility costs.
Usually works without a problem for me on FF and Chrome
Note though that you need to close the whole private browser window between each article to unset the cookies.