The long
read
The air
conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world
The global dominance of air conditioning was
not inevitable. Illustration: Guardian Design
The warmer
it gets, the more we use air conditioning. The more we use air conditioning,
the warmer it gets. Is there any way out of this trap?
by Stephen
Buranyi
Thu 29 Aug
2019 06.00 BST
On a
sweltering Thursday evening in Manhattan last month, people across New York
City were preparing for what meteorologists predicted would be the hottest
weekend of the year. Over the past two decades, every record for peak
electricity use in the city has occurred during a heatwave, as millions of
people turn on their air conditioning units at the same time. And so, at the
midtown headquarters of Con Edison, the company that supplies more than 10
million people in the New York area with electricity, employees were busy
turning a conference room on the 19th floor into an emergency command centre.
Inside the
conference room, close to 80 engineers and company executives, joined by
representatives of the city’s emergency management department, monitored the
status of the city power grid, directed ground crews and watched a set of dials
displaying each borough’s electricity use tick upward. “It’s like the bridge in
Star Trek in there,” Anthony Suozzo, a former senior system operator with the
company, told me. “You’ve got all hands on deck, they’re telling Scotty to fix
things, the system is running at max capacity.”
Power grids
are measured by the amount of electricity that can pass through them at any one
time. Con Edison’s grid, with 62 power substations and more than 130,000 miles
of power lines and cables across New York City and Westchester County, can
deliver 13,400MW every second. This is roughly equivalent to 18m horsepower.
On a
regular day, New York City demands around 10,000MW every second; during a
heatwave, that figure can exceed 13,000MW. “Do the math, whatever that gap is,
is the AC,” Michael Clendenin, a company spokesman, told me. The combination of
high demand and extreme temperature can cause parts of the system to overheat
and fail, leading to blackouts. In 2006, equipment failure left 175,000 people
in Queens without power for a week, during a heatwave that killed 40 people.
This year,
by the evening of Sunday 21 July, with temperatures above 36C (97F) and demand
at more than 12,000MW every second, Con Edison cut power to 50,000 customers in
Brooklyn and Queens for 24 hours, afraid that parts of the nearby grid were
close to collapse, which could have left hundreds of thousands of people
without power for days. The state had to send in police to help residents, and
Con Edison crews dispensed dry ice for people to cool their homes.
As the
world gets hotter, scenes like these will become increasingly common. Buying an
air conditioner is perhaps the most popular individual response to climate
change, and air conditioners are almost uniquely power-hungry appliances: a
small unit cooling a single room, on average, consumes more power than running
four fridges, while a central unit cooling an average house uses more power
than 15. “Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity
was going to air conditioning,” says John Dulac, an analyst at the
International Energy Agency (IEA). “These are ‘oh shit’ moments.”
There are
just over 1bn single-room air conditioning units in the world right now – about
one for every seven people on earth. Numerous reports have projected that by
2050 there are likely to be more than 4.5bn, making them as ubiquitous as the
mobile phone is today. The US already uses as much electricity for air
conditioning each year as the UK uses in total. The IEA projects that as the
rest of the world reaches similar levels, air conditioning will use about 13%
of all electricity worldwide, and produce 2bn tonnes of CO2 a year – about the
same amount as India, the world’s third-largest emitter, produces today.
All of
these reports note the awful irony of this feedback loop: warmer temperatures
lead to more air conditioning; more air conditioning leads to warmer
temperatures. The problem posed by air conditioning resembles, in miniature,
the problem we face in tackling the climate crisis. The solutions that we reach
for most easily only bind us closer to the original problem.
The global
dominance of air conditioning was not inevitable. As recently as 1990, there
were only about 400m air conditioning units in the world, mostly in the US.
Originally built for industrial use, air conditioning eventually came to be
seen as essential, a symbol of modernity and comfort. Then air conditioning
went global. Today, as with other drivers of the climate crisis, we race to find
solutions – and puzzle over how we ended up so closely tied to a technology
that turns out to be drowning us.
Like the
aqueduct or the automobile, air conditioning is a technology that transformed
the world. Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of independent Singapore,
called it “one of the signal inventions of history” that allowed the rapid
modernisation of his tropical country. In 1998, the American academic Richard
Nathan told the New York Times that, along with the “civil rights revolution”,
air conditioning had been the biggest factor in changing American demography
and politics over the previous three decades, enabling extensive residential
development in the very hot, and very conservative, American south.
A century
ago, few would have predicted this. For the first 50 years of its existence,
air conditioning was mainly restricted to factories and a handful of public
spaces. The initial invention is credited to Willis Carrier, an American
engineer at a heating and ventilation company, who was tasked in 1902 with
reducing humidity in a Brooklyn printing factory. Today we assume that the
purpose of air conditioning is to reduce heat, but engineers at the time
weren’t solely concerned with temperature. They wanted to create the most
stable possible conditions for industrial production – and in a print factory,
humidity curled sheets of paper and smudged ink.
Carrier
realised that removing heat from the factory air would reduce humidity, and so
he borrowed technology from the nascent refrigeration industry to create what
was, and still is, essentially a jacked-up fridge. Then as now, air
conditioning units work by breathing in warm air, passing it across a cold
surface, and exhaling cool, dry air. The invention was an immediate success
with industry – textile, ammunition, and pharmaceutical factories were among
the first adopters – and then began to catch on elsewhere. The House of
Representatives installed air conditioning in 1928, followed by the White House
and the Senate in 1929. But during this period, most Americans encountered air
conditioning only in places such as theatres or department stores, where it was
seen as a delightful novelty.
It wasn’t
until the late 1940s, when it began to enter people’s homes, that the air
conditioner really conquered the US. Before then, according to the historian
Gail Cooper, the industry had struggled to convince the public that air
conditioning was a necessity, rather than a luxury. In her definitive account
of the early days of the industry, Air-Conditioning America, Cooper notes that
magazines described air conditioning as a flop with consumers. Fortune called
it “a prime public disappointment of the 1930s”. By 1938 only one out of every
400 American homes had an air conditioner; today it is closer to nine out of
10.
What
fuelled the rise of the air conditioning was not a sudden explosion in consumer
demand, but the influence of the industries behind the great postwar housing
boom. Between 1946 and 1965, 31m new homes were constructed in the US, and for
the people building those houses, air conditioning was a godsend. Architects
and construction companies no longer had to worry much about differences in
climate – they could sell the same style of home just as easily in New Mexico
as in Delaware. The prevailing mentality was that just about any problems
caused by hot climates, cheap building materials, shoddy design or poor city
planning could be overcome, as the American Institute of Architects wrote in
1973, “by the brute application of more air conditioning”. As Cooper writes,
“Architects, builders and bankers accepted air conditioning first, and
consumers were faced with a fait accompli that they merely had to ratify.”
Equally
essential to the rise of the air conditioner were electric utilities – the
companies that operate power plants and sell electricity to consumers. Electric
utilities benefit from every new house hooked up to their grid, but throughout
the early 20th century they were also looking for ways to get these new
customers to use even more electricity in their homes. This process was known
as “load building”, after the industry term (load) for the amount of
electricity used at any one time. “The cost of electricity was low, which was
fine by the utilities. They simply increased demand, and encouraged customers
to use more electricity so they could keep expanding and building new power
plants,” says Richard Hirsh, a historian of technology at Virginia Tech.
The
utilities quickly recognised that air conditioning was a serious load builder.
As early as 1935, Commonwealth Edison, the precursor to the modern Con Edison,
noted in its end-of-year report that the power demand from air conditioners was
growing at 50% a year, and “offered substantial potential for the future”. That
same year, Electric Light & Power, an industry trade magazine, reported
that utilities in big cities “are now pushing air conditioning. For their own
good, all power companies should be very active in this field.”
By the
1950s, that future had arrived. Electric utilities ran print, radio and film
adverts promoting air conditioning, as well as offering financing and discount
rates to construction companies that installed it. In 1957, Commonwealth Edison
reported that for the first time, peak electricity usage had occurred not in
the winter, when households were turning up their heating, but during summer,
when people were turning on their air-conditioning units. By 1970, 35% of
American houses had air conditioning, more than 200 times the number just three
decades earlier.
At the same
time, air-conditioning-hungry commercial buildings were springing up across the
US. The all-glass skyscraper, a building style that, because of its poor
reflective properties and lack of ventilation, often requires more than half
its electricity output be reserved for air conditioning, became an American
mainstay. Between 1950 and 1970 the average electricity used per square foot in
commercial buildings more than doubled. New York’s World Trade Center,
completed in 1974, had what was then the world’s largest AC unit, with nine
enormous engines and more than 270km of piping for cooling and heating.
Commentators at the time noted that it used the same amount of electricity each
day as the nearby city of Schenectady, population 80,000.
The
air-conditioning industry, construction companies and electric utilities were
all riding the great wave of postwar American capitalism. In their pursuit of
profit, they ensured that the air conditioner became an essential element of
American life. “Our children are raised in an air-conditioned culture,” an AC
company executive told Time magazine in 1968. “You can’t really expect them to
live in a home that isn’t air conditioned.” Over time, the public found they
liked air conditioning, and its use continued to climb, reaching 87% of US
households by 2009.
The postwar
building spree was underpinned by the idea that all of these new buildings
would consume incredible amounts of power, and that this would not present any
serious problems in the future. In 1992, the journal Energy and Buildings
published an article by the British conservative academic Gwyn Prins, arguing
that the American addiction to air conditioning was a symbol of its profound
decadence. Prins summarised America’s guiding credo as: “We shall be cool, our
plates shall overflow and gas shall be $1 a gallon, Amen.”
During the
time that air conditioning was reshaping America’s cities, it had little effect
elsewhere. (With some exceptions – Japan, Australia and Singapore were early
adopters.) Now, however, air conditioning is finally sweeping across the rest
of the world. If the march of air conditioning across the US tracked its
postwar building and consumption boom, its more recent expansion has followed
the course of globalisation. As the rest of the world adopts more Americanised
ways of building and living, air conditioning follows.
In the
1990s, many countries across Asia opened up to foreign investment and embarked
on an unprecedented urban building spree. Over the past three decades, about
200 million people in India have moved to cities; in China, the number is more
than 500 million. From New Delhi to Shanghai, heavily air-conditioned office
buildings, hotels and malls began to spring up. These buildings were not only
indistinguishable from those in New York or London, but were often constructed
by the same builders and architects. “When you had this money coming in from
the rest of the world for high-end buildings, it often came with an American or
European designer or consultancy attached,” says Ashok Lall, an Indian
architect who focuses on housing and low-energy design. “And so it comes as a
package with AC. They thought that meant progress.”
As the rate
and scale of building intensified, traditional architectural methods for
mitigating hot temperatures were jettisoned. Leena Thomas, an Indian professor
of architecture at the University of Technology in Sydney, told me that in
Delhi in the early 1990s older forms of building design – which had dealt with
heat through window screens, or facades and brise-soleils – were slowly
displaced by American or European styles. “I would say that this international
style has a lot to answer for,” she said. Just like the US in the 20th century,
but on an even greater scale, homes and offices were increasingly being built
in such a way that made air conditioning indispensable. “Developers were
building without thinking,” says Rajan Rawal, a professor of architecture and
city planning at Cept University in Ahmedabad. “The speed of construction that
was required created pressure. So they simply built and relied on technology to
fix it later.”
Lall says
that even with affordable housing it is possible to reduce the need for air
conditioning by designing carefully. “You balance the sizes of opening, the
area of the wall, the thermal properties, and shading, the orientation,” he
says. But he argues that, in general, developers are not interested. “Even
little things like adequate shading and insulation in the rooftop are resisted.
The builders don’t appear to see any value in this. They want 10- to 20-storey
blocks close to one another. That’s just how business works now, that’s what
the cities are forcing us to do. It’s all driven by speculation and land value.”
This
reliance on air conditioning is a symptom of what the Chinese art critic Hou
Hanru has called the epoch of post-planning. Today, planning as we
traditionally think of it – centralised, methodical, preceding development – is
vanishingly rare. Markets dictate and allocate development at incredible speed,
and for the actual inhabitants, the conditions they require to live are sourced
later, in a piecemeal fashion. “You see these immense towers go up, and they’re
already locking the need for air conditioning into the building,” says Marlyne
Sahakian, a sociologist who studies the use of air conditioning in the
Philippines.
t
Over coffee
recently in London, the influential Malaysian architect Ken Yeang lamented what
he viewed as the loss of an entire generation of architects and builders to a
dependency on fossil fuels to control the environment. “So much damage has been
done by those buildings,” he says, “I have entirely lost hope in my generation;
perhaps the next one can design a rescue mission.”
To its
proponents, air conditioning is often presented as a simple choice that
consumers make to improve their lives as they climb the economic ladder. “It’s
no longer a luxury product but a necessity,” an executive at the Indian branch
of the Japanese air-conditioner manufacturing giant Daikin told the Associated
Press last year. “Everyone deserves AC.”
This
refrain is as familiar in Rajasthan now as it was in the US 70 years ago. Once
air conditioning is embedded in people’s lives, they tend to want to keep it.
But that fact obscures the ways that consumers’ choices are shaped by forces
beyond their control. In her 1967 book Vietnam, Mary McCarthy reflected on this
subtle proscription of choice in American life. “In American hotel rooms,” she
wrote, “you can decide whether or not to turn on the air conditioning (that is
your business), but you cannot open the window.”
One step
towards solving the problem presented by air conditioning – and one that
doesn’t require a complete overhaul of the modern city – would be to build a
better air conditioner. There is plenty of room for improvement. The invention
of air conditioning predates both the first aeroplane and the first public
radio broadcast, and the underlying technology has not changed much since 1902.
“Everything is still based on the vapour compression cycle; same as a
refrigerator. It’s effectively the same process as a century ago,” says Colin
Goodwin, the technical director of the Building Services Research and
Information Association. “What has happened is we’ve expanded the affordability
of the air conditioner, but as far as efficiency, they’ve improved but they
haven’t leaped.”
One scheme
to encourage engineers to build a more efficient air conditioner was launched
last year by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a US-based energy policy
thinktank, and endorsed by the UN environment programme and government of
India. They are offering $3m to the winner of the inaugural Global Cooling
prize. The aim is to design an air conditioner that is five times more
efficient than the current standard model, but which costs no more than twice
as much money to produce. They have received more than a hundred entries, from
lone inventors to prominent universities, and even research teams from multibillion-dollar
appliance giants.
But, as
with other technological responses to climate change, it is far from certain
that the arrival of a more efficient air conditioner will significantly reduce
global emissions. According to the RMI, in order to keep total global emissions
from new air conditioners from rising, their prize-winning efficient air
conditioner would need to go on sale no later than 2022, and capture 80% of the
market by 2030. In other words, the new product would have to almost totally
replace its rivals in less than a decade. Benjamin Sovacool, professor of
energy policy at Sussex University and a lead author on the next
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, describes this
ambition as not impossible, but pretty unlikely.
“This idea of technology saving us is a
narrative that we want to believe. Its simplicity is comforting,” he says. It
has proven so comforting, in fact, that it is often discussed as if it is our
first and best response to climate change – even as the timeframe for inventing
and implementing such technologies becomes so narrow as to strain credulity.
New
air-conditioner technology would be welcome, but it is perhaps “the fourth, or
maybe fifth thing on the list we should do” to reduce the emissions from air
conditioning, says Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, a professor of climate change and energy
policy at Central European University, and a lead author on the forthcoming
IPCC report. Among the higher priorities that she mentions are planting trees,
retrofitting old buildings with proper ventilation, and no longer building
“concrete and glass cages that can’t withstand a heatwave”. She adds: “All of
these things would be cheaper too, in the long run.”
But while
these things are technically cheaper, they require changes in behaviour and
major policy shifts – and the open secret of the climate crisis is that nobody
really knows how to make these kind of changes on the systematic, global scale
that the severity of the crisis demands.
If we are
not about to be rescued by technology, and worldwide policy changes look like a
distant hope, there remains a very simple way of reducing the environmental
damage done by air conditioning: use less of it. But, as the ecological
economist and IPCC author Julia Steinberger has written, any serious proposals
to change our lifestyles – cutting down on driving, flying or imported avocados
– are considered “beyond the pale, heretic, almost insane”. This is especially
true of air conditioning, where calls to use it less are frequently treated as
suggestions that people should die in heatwaves, or evidence of a malicious
desire to deny other people the same comforts that citizens in wealthy
countries already enjoy.
This
summer, the publication of a New York Times article asking “Do Americans need
air conditioning?” touched off a thousand furious social media posts, uniting
figures from the feminist writer and critic Roxane Gay (“You wouldn’t last a
summer week in Florida without it. Get a grip”) to the conservative professor
and pundit Tom Nichols (“Air conditioning is why we left the caves … You will
get my AC from me when you pry it from my frozen, frosty hands”).
Despite
this backlash, there is a reasonable case to be made that we are over-reliant
on air conditioning and could cut back. The supposedly ideal indoor temperature
has long been determined by air-conditioning engineers, using criteria that
suggest pretty much all humans want the same temperature range at all times.
The underlying idea is that comfort is objective, and that a building in
Jakarta should be the same temperature as one in Boston. In practice, says
Leena Thomas, this means that the temperature in most air-conditioned buildings
is usually “low-20s plus/minus one”.
But not
everyone has accepted the notion that there is such as thing as the objectively
“right” temperature. Studies have suggested that men have different ideal
temperatures from women. In offices around the world, “Men toil in their dream
temperatures, while women are left to shiver,” argued a 2015 article in the
Telegraph, one of many suggesting that the scientific research had simply
confirmed something millions of women already knew.
Researchers
have also shown that people who live in hotter areas, even for a very short
time, are comfortable at higher indoor temperatures. They contend that, whether
it is a state of mind or a biological adjustment, human comfort is adaptive,
not objective. This is something that seems obvious to many people who live
with these temperatures. At a recent conference on air conditioning that I
attended in London, an Indian delegate chided the crowd: “If I can work and
function at 30C, you could too – believe you me.”
Adding to
the weight of evidence against the idea of the “ideal” temperature, Frederick
Rohles, a psychologist and member of the American Society of Heating,
Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, has conducted studies showing
that subjects who were shown a false thermometer displaying a high temperature
felt warm, even if the room was cool. “These are the sorts of things that drive
my engineering colleagues crazy,” he wrote in 2007. “Comfort is a state of
mind!”
Ashok Lall
points out that once people are open to the idea that the temperature in a
building can change, you can build houses that use air conditioning as a last
resort, not a first step. “But there is no broad culture or regulation
underpinning this,” he says. At the moment, it is the deterministic camp that
has control of the levers of power – and their view continues to be reflected
in building codes and standards around the world.
How, then,
can we get ourselves out of the air-conditioning trap? On the continuum of
habits and technologies that we need to reduce or abandon if we are to avoid
the worst effects of the climate crisis, the air conditioner probably falls
somewhere in the middle: harder to reduce than our habit of eating meat five
times a week; easier than eliminating the fossil-fuel automobile.
According
to Nick Mabey, a former senior civil servant who runs the UK-based climate
politics consultancy E3G, air conditioning has – like many consumer products
that are deeply embedded in society and, in aggregate, drive global warming –
escaped the notice of most governments. There is little precedent for top-down
regulation. “There is no department that handles this, there’s no guy you can
just go talk to who controls air conditioning,” he says.
The key,
Mabey says, is to find the places it can be controlled, and begin the push
there. He is supporting a UN programme that aims to improve the efficiency –
and thus reduce the emissions – of all air conditioners sold worldwide. It
falls under the unglamorous label of consumer standards. Currently, the average
air conditioner on the market is about half as efficient as the best available
unit. Closing that gap even a little bit would take a big chunk out of future
emissions.
At the
local level, some progress is being made. The New York City council recently
passed far-reaching legislation requiring all large buildings in the city to
reduce their overall emissions by 40% by 2030, with a goal of 80% by 2050,
backed with hefty fines for offenders. Costa Constantinides, the city council
member spearheading the legislation, says it is “the largest carbon-emissions
reduction ever mandated by any city, anywhere”. The Los Angeles mayor’s office
is working on similar plans, to make all buildings net-zero carbon by 2050.
Other
cities are taking even more direct action. In the mid-1980s, Geneva, which has
a warmer climate than much of the US, the local government banned the
installation of air conditioning except by special permission. This approach is
relatively common across Switzerland and, as a result, air conditioning
accounts for less than 2% of all electricity used. The Swiss don’t appear to
miss air conditioning too much – its absence is rarely discussed, and they have
largely learned to do without.
In countries
where air conditioning is still relatively new, an immense opportunity exists
to find alternatives before it becomes a way of life. The aim, in the words of
Thomas, should be to avoid “the worst of the west”. Recently, the Indian
government adopted recommendations by Thomas, Rawal and others into its
countrywide national residential building code (“an immensely powerful
document” says Rawal). It allows higher indoor temperatures based on Indian
field studies – Indian levels of comfort – and notes the “growing prevalence”
of buildings that use air conditioning as a technology of last resort.
Cutting
down on air conditioning doesn’t mean leaving modernity behind, but it does
require facing up to some of its consequences. “It’s not a matter of going back
to the past. But before, people knew how to work with the climate,” says Ken
Yeang. “Air conditioning became a way to control it, and it was no longer a
concern. No one saw the consequences. People see them now.”