Air Conditioning as Public Enemy #1?

With the college football season upon us, we are reminded once again just how engrained the sport is in the life of the South. Of course, there are places across the nation that take their football seriously, too, but no region brings college football fandom to quite the fever pitch as the South.

Four years ago, in September of 2012, PACE wrote about an item that is just as quintessential to life in the Southeast: air conditioning. We told our readers in a piece called “Keeping Our Cool” that people worldwide were beginning to catch on to the value of conditioned air and the effect that technology has on productivity and quality of life. In India, for example, air conditioning is becoming a status symbol.

“The bigger picture is that almost all of the world’s new urban centers are located in the tropics – and all of them are going to want to stay cool,” we wrote. “For those of you counting at home, those new A/C devotees will number about one billion by 2025.”

All of this, of course, has huge implications on power demand, since air conditioning requires significant amounts of electricity. One of those implications is rationing. Take Japan, for example, which imposed power rationing in the wake of nuclear power shutdowns. A researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo found that every degree increase above 77 degrees resulted in a 2% loss in productivity. According to the report, some businesses were losing as much as 30 minutes of productivity per employee per day. And to boot, many employees began using inefficient desk fans that all but negated the conservation campaign. Clearly, air conditioning is a pretty important feature of a productive, modern workplace.

However, not every one is behind the A/C revolution. A recent blog post from Donn Dears points out that air conditioners have become a target of the environmental lobby. (Dears, by the way, writes a very informative blog on the realities of electricity generation.)

“Air-conditioners and refrigerators pose as big a threat to life on the planet as the threat of terrorism,” Secretary of State John Kerry recently said while in Vienna, Austria.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy has also called for a global deal to ban hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the chemicals used in modern air conditioners and refrigerators, and to promote alternative chemicals for use in those appliances. Kerry and McCarthy believe that HFCs are a major contributor to climate change, more potent even than fossil fuels.

HCFs, though, are used for a reason. They are very efficient and don’t cost much. As Dears points out, they also present no fire hazard. That doesn’t matter to Kerry or McCarthy or others who are laser-focused on the agenda of throwing cold water on the modern way of life. It also doesn’t seem to matter to them that other nations are likely to do whatever they want, regardless of U.S. posturing, when it comes to staying cool and raising the standard of living.

“While America’s most innovative energy planners focus on new ways to take small slices from the pie that is national energy demand, the rest of the developing world is building new bakeries,” we wrote back in 2012. “They are gathering and deploying the resources to cool down a billion new energy users in places like Brazil, India, and China. It is a monumental task, and they aren’t asking for our advice, much less for our permission.”

Air conditioning a bigger threat to the globe than terrorism? C’mon, Mr. Secretary. Have you ever seen an air conditioner kill innocent civilians? Instill fear into entire nations? Degrade and subjugate women? Turn little boys into cold-blooded assassins? Me either. That type of rhetoric is over the top and not particularly useful to debates about energy and the environment.

Air conditioning isn’t going anywhere, at least not where I live. We should be focused on making air conditioners even more efficient, not on making their operation more expensive. We should concentrate on making sure we have the power supply to run those air conditioners, not trying to make people abandon them. Those are customer-focused solutions we all can live with.