The rise of air conditioning (2018)
historytoday.com
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[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/study...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/06/28/1010923130/the-pacific-northw...
Also there are much cheaper ways to cool than we do today. There are a lot of passive cooling systems. An easy one is to bury pipes a few feet (>3-4ft) under ground and run a fan to push air through the pipes.
You can also put pipes under a near by creek / pond if you have one near by (I have seen this done).
There’s a whole lot of passive systems. Gardens on roofs, sun rooms, underground pipes, water cooled, etc. I’m currently looking at building a house with a combination of these.
The problem with all these is the increased price of construction / inability / unreasonableness to adjust old homes. I do think new buildings should take advantage of some of these. But old builds aren’t really possible to convert.
Also, if you have a single family house, you can just put up solar on the roof, and that will cover AC energy expenditure, all your other energy needs from spring until fall and then have some to give back to the grid.
You’d be better served running virtually anything else besides “air” through the pipes if efficiency is your goal.
This can cause temperature immediately outside your window to be higher. Or even reflect it into your neighbours houses.
I still have this on my windows too though. It does make a big difference. It's just worth realizing the heat still goes somewhere.
Also, the financing is so easy that you don't need access to much capital even - if you live in a single family house and you can afford electricity then you can afford solar.
> pushing people into mass starvation
Record number of people worldwide are moving toward starvation, U.N. warns July 7, 20222:15 AM ET https://www.npr.org/2022/07/07/1110219180/record-number-of-p...
> and poverty
Inflation pushed 71 million people into poverty since war in Ukraine began Economy Jul 7, 2022 2:24 PM EDT https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/inflation-pushed-71-mil...
Both of these issues...were they brought to you by people who want to stop climate change? Or were they brought to you by the people who do not care about climate change?
Starvation and poverty are being created by the same systems and short sighted thinking that are bringing on climate change. It is a truth that the human population should have never become this large. And how did that happen? With technology and capitalism.
Inflation was (likely) caused by central bank money printing to bankroll social spending.
Just for statistical reasons, do the 97 out of 100 have it relatively better resource-wise than the 3 out of 4 in the old days?
And is it moving in the ideal direction right now?
Bangladeshis have the second most positive views of capitalism of any country: https://archive.dhakatribune.com/uncategorized/2015/05/05/ba...
[citation needed]
It would be tough to cite exactly how large is too much, and there's a legitimate difference of opinion on whether it's already too late by now.
Regardless of the absolute population size at the time, the real problem seems to be out-of-control growth.
For that there's no citation needed if you're old enough.
Because of the rise in radio, then TV, today's elderly are about the first to have lifetime exposure to world events and developments in real time across the widest number of decades physically possible for our species.
Not everyone gets wiser as they get older, but plenty do and that's a type of wisdom that can not be acquired any other way.
Live long enough with enough attention to these things locally and in communication with a lifetime of first-hand information as well as world-wide media, things which turn out to be fully corroborated in every single way you just eventually can not realistically deny.
The unbridled reproduction of consumers rather than producers for quite some time now seems to be the underlying exponential problem.
And that's not human nature, it's simply expressing the same inhuman nature as all the other living creatures.
According to all sources, always, everywhere, things were better for everyone, when they were less crowded with consumers for which there is not enough being sustainably produced.
If we're not going to end up joining the majority of Earth species that have become extinct, this is one key element where a much more distinctly human touch needs to be completely ingrained in place of natural instinct.
Not surprisingly, out-of-control reproduction is almost like cancer leading to eventual death in a local microcosm and many have been aware of this for millennia.
With nothing but text and oral tradition to preserve these near-prehistoric observations, that may be why so many different ancient cultures have such elaborate taboos regarding reproductive activity.
Right now, though, we know what Does Currently save lives. There is no dispute. Those same things Might also be bad in the future.
To put it more clearly, killing today to save the future is a tough argument.
Surely there is something else that could be done other than subsidizing fossil fuels to make poor people not freeze, boil and/or starve ?
Well, okay that seems like one of the few items that would make it through a government run by and for fossil fuel interests, but in theory at least there are other options that could be explored if we cared about poor people more than just as conduits of cash to the fossil fuel industry.
Not necessarily wrong, but it may have also encouraged more people 'than necessary' to live where they "shouldn't". It brings to mind the "Phoenix (Arizona) scene" from the show King of the Hill:
> [looks at car-reported temperature] Bobby: 111F? Phoenix can't really be that hot, can it?
> Bobby: Oh my God, it's like standing on the sun!
> Peggy: This city should not exist. It is a monument to man's arrogance.
I'd ofc be thrilled to find an alternative cooling method that works quickly and well in humid climates, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to exist yet (dry heat people apparently have other options tho)
Ironically, it’s posts like yours that I find toxic.
If the first world population used air conditioning less, it would allow poor people, the third world, who tend to live in environments that are hotter and more subject to costs of climate change, to use air conditioning more without adding more to humanity's carbon footprint.
We as humans are quite greedy. We can live perfectly happy and comfortable lives with less plastic, less driving, less waste, but we have become addicted to all this consumption, all this convenience, and the ever greater convenience of consumption (couch shopping and to-your-door delivery, same day or hour even). We have tied our happiness to it. We have no qualms about being a small fraction of the Earth's population yet consuming and hoarding an extremely disproportionate amount of its resources, usually at the expense of poorer people, apparently because a meritocracy is at work.
The modern world's values are ever more driven by "me, me, me!" and less by "us".
This is not the only way. We could also produce cleaner energy in the first world by e.g. building nuclear, solar and (probably off-shore) wind. Then those of us in the first world and the poor of the third world could have the life-saving AC technology, and maybe make the third world a bit richer in the process.
I have seen lots of people try to pull the ladder up on developing nations, so was expecting that in the article based on your comment. But instead found this:
> These cities are characterised by badly insulated buildings and energy-wasteful transport systems: these two inefficiencies consume far more fossil fuels than AC systems.
The article kind of rambled, but I agree with where it ends up, we should have always been pushing for more efficient A/C and heating (and in some places we were, proving it was possible and indeed irresponsible not to) and it is systems, not individual technologies, we should be fixing e.g. carbon taxes don't affect renewable powered AC (though we need to be careful about the refridgerents used).
And because the article is rambling, supporters of various remedies from AC unit regulation to thermostat regulation[0] (where regulators centrally control temperatures "only in emergencies") to even outright quotas or bans can each cite this article as justification. The unintended consequences of these are IMO anti-human.
Besides that, they are becoming more efficient, and there are alternative approaches to control temperature at homes.
Also, AC needs energy during clear summer days - exactly when it’s the cheapest to deliver by PV. With minimal effect on climate.
It’s finally gaining in popularity, and depending on weather conditions a modern heat pump can provide heating several times more efficient than straight up burning fuel even if you’re producing electricity from that fuel.
When your electricity is nuclear or hydro (or other renewables but that tends to be a bit sticky in winter) it’s manna.
I may be wrong here, no scientific data behind this.
When people say that AC costs correlate with solar power, they are pointing out that the same solar energy that increases heat gain for buildings during the bright hours also increases photovoltaic output which can be used to compensate for that heat gain.
> As far as I know, modern appliances use gasses without this problem. It also holds for fridges.
Completely wrong, and the exact opposite of reality.
The currently-used gases are such a problem that the plan is to phase them out for new one in the upcoming years. Just do a search for "R410a phase out".
> Because of the global warming potential of many HFC refrigerants, the latest amendment to the Montreal Protocol, the Kigali Amendment, has proposed to phase-down the use of refrigerants such as R-410A. The phase down is expected to begin sometime in the 2020’s. The leading replacement for R-410A refrigerant is a pure, single component refrigerant called R-32, which has one-third the global warming potential of R‑410A.
* https://www.goodmanmfg.com/resources/hvac-learning-center/hv...
One possible replacement is R-32:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difluoromethane
Automotive AC has already moved to HFO-1234yf (from R-134a, Freon):
> An increasingly important environmental concern is the disposal of old refrigerators—initially because freon coolant damages the ozone layer—but as older generation refrigerators wear out, the destruction of CFC-bearing insulation also causes concern. Modern refrigerators usually use a refrigerant called HFC-134a (1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane), which does not deplete the ozone layer, unlike Freon. R-134a is becoming much rarer in Europe. Newer refrigerants are being used instead. The main refrigerant now used is R-600a, or isobutane which has a smaller effect on the atmosphere if released.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator#Disposal
* https://homeaffluence.com/what-coolants-are-primarily-used-i...
Assuming we have one AC installation per person in developed countries, and each installation releases its full contents once every ten years, it would increase the carbon footprint of people in developed nations from ~10T/yr to ~10.02-10.1T a year.
Don't get me wrong - we should minimise the release of such gases and find better gases for AC, but it is not a significant issue right now.
Sure, moving the heat outside makes the environment slightly warmer, but that's nothing compared to the significant amounts of solar energy getting trapped because you made the energy to run your a/c by burning coal or any other fossil fuel
(Also - the volume of every place where you could reasonably want A/C is negligible compared to the volume of the earth's atmosphere, so that isn't as much of an issue)
But more importantly, even if we put all the energy produced by humanity into space heaters, we wouldn't be able to increase the planet's temperature by any measurable amount.
To give you a sense of perspective - Humanity produces 4 TW of electricity on average at any given moment. Sun delivers at that same moment 170,000 TW of energy.
What he said was a true statement and the effects are real and quantifiable. https://news.asu.edu/content/excess-heat-air-conditioners-ca...
Responsible environmentalists should set an example for everyone else and move to an area where heat isn’t required, then they can also choose to live without air conditioning.
The Texas power grid failed in the winter, not the summer.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/texas-power-use-breaks-reco...
It could fail this summer due to insufficient capacity relative to demand. Alerts and calls for conservation have been provided starting last week, this time the lion's share of the increased risk can be attributed to air conditioning alone.
This occurred for a different reason in the winter because it got so unusually cold that the nominal water content of the natural gas froze in critical places within the delivery system and the gas could not be provided to the gas-fired electrical power plants. Unprecedented electrical climate-control demand was also a factor then.
When we were freezing in the dark with nothing but electrical heaters and no electricity, I didn't know how the traditional homes having natural gas connections fared. Nobody has gas lights any more but plenty still have gas heating & cooking. Natural gas is also often supposed to fuel household emergency generators, maybe they were OK to some extent. Liquified propane is a much more expensive alternative fuel gas and that's stored on site, but it could also possibly become obstructed by ice if it gets cold enough.
One thing about the way natural gas burns and electricity is made.
Traditionally it takes enough gas to heat 3 homes in order to produce the electricity to heat one home.
Regardless of price.
Not all of the energy from the gas is recovered either way, and after the electricity is delivered to the residence it is converted to heat more efficiently than gas but it's too late then to say there is a favorable comparison overall.
This leaves gas heat still less environmentally detrimental compared to electrical heat when the electricity is from a gas fired plant.
Pricing between these options when available can be expected to exaggerate uncertainties when comparing apples to oranges so there is that. Your pricing may vary, greatly.
Then there's the traditional thing about the way electricity heats and the way it cools.
Once you've got the electricity and you want to use it for temperature control, then it takes about 4 times as much electricity for an air-conditioner to make it one degree cooler than it takes for an elecric heater to make it one degree hotter.
Those electric heaters are wicked efficient on an electrical kWh basis.
But if you're on batteries you could easily conclude that any electric climate control is out-of-the question.
The remaining math can be derived from your own personal situation, and most often it can reveal why air-conditioning was considered nothing but a luxury item for so many generations until consumption got completely out-of-control.
However energy is generated by burning fossil fuels
AC specifically allowed more economic activity in large areas of the world which drove more power usage which drove more AC in an increasing spiral. It's not the only energy multiplier, but cities like Dubai would not exist in anywhere near its current size and thus energy requirements without aircon, and instead economic acitivty would go to places with less energy overhead (you don't need aircon in anywhere near the same amounts in Istanbul for example)
… you say that like it’s a bad thing…
The solution hinted at seems to be ditch all technology, transport and modern methods and go back to pre-industrialised society.
How about campaigning for something useful like more efficiency or insulation?
No such much AC specifically, but rather the refrigerant loop generally, IMHO.
Being able to keep humans cool, but also food chilled (to limit bacteria growth), food frozen (for long term storage and transport), as well as medication, vaccines, blood, tissue samples, etc.
The cold chain (in logistics) is a marvel of human accomplishment:
...until we all realize it was short sighted because it killed of billions because of starvation and the inability to cool ourselves.
Insulation at the scale needed to avoid climate catastrophe would require a massive international mobilization, along the lines of the Green New Deal and a Green Marshall Plan, to renovate all buildings everywhere before 2050. Sadly the political will to do this seems absent from almost every country, with a couple possible exceptions such as Chile attempting to rewrite their constitution to prioritize climate justice. Basically no countries are approaching even the inadequate Paris agreement targets.
And if you achieved such insulation, without other more drastic changes to our society, people would just run their AC/heat more to reach more luxurious temperatures, and we would not avoid any greenhouse gas emissions.
Therefore we should be working to reduce supply of fossil fuels, to 'keep it in the ground'. If there is less to go round, then efficiencies will still be found but used to maintain what we had (as far as practicable) as opposed to increasing demand
Above a reasonable threshold, personal wealth is arguably theft from the commons anyway.
Someone has to go without to reduce the total consumption. Who is it in your example? And by how much such that the total usage decreases?
But that has an upper limit - there is an ideal temperature. People won't be cooling their houses to 15°C in the summer and heating them to 40°C in the winter.
A lot of people bring this up, but fail to realize that there is a limit to induced demand. For example if you are able to light your house with led bulbs you aren't suddenly going to throw up more lights to light up the neighborhood. There are actual limits to demand and you can exceed them through efficiency gains.
Jevons Paradox is about these societal demands, which influence collective usage of a resource in the opposite direction from individual usage.
Meh, it depends.
Having a light bulb that uses 15W instead of 100W to illuminate a room is certainly a win. There's only so many lights that you'd put in a given area to achieve the same result, even if you add more for aesthetic reasons: there's only so many lumens that are useful in an area.
Furnaces and water heaters are now >90% efficient, and given that they (direct) vent from the outside, and exhaust to the outside increases safety and air leakage. Do you add more heaters and furnaces to a house because each is more efficient.
Cars are more efficient, and yet total annual distance driven (in the US) seems to have plateaued and fallen over the last decade or so:
* https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/12/distance-driven-per...
You'd think that, but we now see people experimenting with light bulbs that are bright as the sun, purportedly to improve their mood: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21660718 "I bought an extremely bright “corn cob” style bulb. It emits as much light as about 40 incandescents, and produces enough waste heat that it needs an internal cooling fan to dissipate it." It's not difficult to imagine a future where this is the norm, and people having anything dimmer than full sunlight indoors is considered medieval and backwards. We can always find new limits to what is "useful".
UPDATE: In that article, the author also says this of the lightbulb: "It draws about 2 kWh per day (assuming 8h of usage), which costs about $0.30 at typical rates. This is comparable to one day of a modern fridge or one load of laundry. Power is cheap, folks!" This is a perfect example of why we need to talk about climate justice, because the average American refrigerator consumes more energy than an average person in many countries: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23106061/energy-inequity-...
The rest of the world cannot live the way we currently do in the USA, if we are to avoid catastrophic global heating.
Just because the efficiency increases and we use less energy doesn't mean that the cost will fall. The cost of energy will most likely rise in the upcoming years due to factoring in the co2 emissions.
At least in Europe and in Poland specifically we are preparing right now for a winter of extremely high energy prices and heating prices. Delivering heat pumps and insulating buildings is on top of government agenda right now. And that is in the middle of summer when temperatures are 20-40 deg C outside.
Revenge Against God For The Crime Of Being.
AC is an enabler of human productivity.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...
Last century we figured out how to force interiors to be cool, reliably.
This must not be confused with the tendency to squander our unique gift of abundant energy. Places like Arizona could have houses with massive walls, arcades, all the refinements the Pueblo, Persians, and many others have brought to living in arid regions: and air conditioning, which is a wonderful invention.
If your solution to ecological crisis is to return humanity to immiseration, I reject that utterly. There are more dangerous things than warm weather and this attitude is prominent among them.
So, sure, in the swamps of Florida, we should be OK with using the AC. But in the dry heat of Texas? Or southern California? Why doesn't America do even the simple things right? In city planning, in cooling, in HOA's dictating lawn upkeep and on and on and on.
Such a bizarre set of practices. The point of HVAC is to bring the temperature to a comfortable level while you wear season appropriate clothing, not to eliminate or invert seasonal differences.
I'm not sure if this was just a joke. I could totally see this being true whichsays a lot already.
In general I don't think efficiency is really a problem. It's self regulating, being more inefficient costs you more so you must find it worth it and that's your choice. The real issue is the incentive mismatch of dirty energy sources being cheaper than clean energy sources. There is nothing inherently problematic with someone deciding using 2 mWh instead of 1 mWh in a month is how they want to do things or deciding it's not worth trying to change things around to optimize.
Everything from painting the roof in special IR emitting and visible light reflecting paint...
To using evaporative cooling (even a small amount of water can make a large cooling effect).
To having large amounts of insulation to keep things cool in the daytime and cooling stuff down at night when the outside is cooler.
To using chilling loops deep underground where the soil is far cooler, or into rivers (where the water is typically cooler) than surface temperatures.
There are so many options for getting coolness with lower energy cost and lower eco-harm... I think it's a real shame we haven't done just a little more R&D to make them viable and commonplace instead of electrically driven air-air heat pumps which really gobble energy.
If anything, insulation (on its own) worsens the problem, because once the heat gets in, it's effectively trapped for days. If it's not combined with shading, or some other way to reflect heat away from the windows, a hot house becomes a hothouse real fast...
I wish there were an easy way to couple all heat producing and heat dissipating devices in my home. Too much heat in my bedroom? Move it into the hot water tank. Too cold in the living room? Use the waste heat from the oven to heat the room.
So I opted for heat-reflective window foils instead. Only costed 30 eur. They help — but only a little. Maybe cool my living rooms by 1C or 2C in the summer. In the mean time my wife complains that the rooms are too dark and uncomfortable. She doesn't understand why I don't just install AC. Neither does anyone else in her social group.
So, what is a man going to do to keep his wife happy?
As someone willing to put effort in to make the world a better place, start a company to develop a low energy equivalent. For example, data centers (which are very energy conscious), are typically cooled with evaporative chillers. They can typically keep the indoor air 15C or so below outdoor air temperatures, especially when humidity is low.
The challenge is evaporative chillers require quite a lot of maintenance (in a datacenter, someone will check water PH and dissolved solids every day for example)... Your efforts will go into automating this process.
Perhaps build a 'home evaporative chiller'? The reward could be huge - many people spend $1000/year or more on electricity for AC. If you can sell them something that costs only $100/year in water charges, they might be happy to pay you say $500 as a service fee/equipment rental.
That is why people do not understand both the scope and the urgency of the issue. Technically it is an easy problem to fix, but to change the hearts and minds of people will take a spiritual revolution.
link : https://www.amazon.in/Symphony-Diet-12-Litre-Cooler/dp/B00IY...
how it works : https://kenstar.in/blog/post/how-does-an-air-cooler-work
It also hasn't been that popular since the advent of AC since they don't do a very good job.
Is the total energy used for the combination of heating and cooling greater in a warm climate or a cold climate, given the same floor space and appropriate insulation and construction?
I was under the impression that less energy would be needed in Dallas than in Chicago, but I don't have actual data.
I think that it will not be long before believing in anthropogenic climate change will become political suicide, since who wants to hear the bad news that we have no solution for? Even worse are those who claim that "we will solve it with science, we always do". It is already too late, and the momentum is getting insane. Nothing we can do about it. A billion brown people will die, and all white people will have AC.