To Battle Climate Change, Begin With Your Air-Conditioner / The cost of cooling: how air conditioning is heating up the world

 To Battle Climate Change, Begin With Your Air-Conditioner

 

By Hope Jahren

July 20, 2021

AFTER COOLING

On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort

By Eric Dean Wilson

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/books/review/after-cooling-eric-dean-wilson.html

 

In his prelude to “After Cooling,” Eric Dean Wilson tells us that he started his research not knowing “a tank of Freon from propane.” It’s a subtle chemistry joke, but a good one. By the end of the first 20 pages, however, the reader realizes beyond a doubt that the author is very aware of everything there is to know about what we call air-conditioning. After his deftly persuasive opening argument that cutting back on machine-made cooling is the most pressing environmental task of our generation, Wilson walks us through the science of chemical coolants in detail, both the chemistry and physics of these miracle molecules, and the horrifying discovery of the havoc they wreak within the thin protective layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.

 

Woven into Wilson’s history of the first modern coolant — Freon, a compound in the chlorofluorocarbon, or CFC, family, was developed in the 1930s — is an interesting fable about how our best efforts toward environmental regulation can bring out the worst in us.

 

In a desperate attempt to save our ozone layer, the Montreal Protocol effectively ended the production of CFCs in 1987, forcing the temperature-control industry to switch to less powerful fluorocarbon compounds. Since then, while the production of CFCs has been banned, their use has not been. This has created a vigorous underground market in previously hoarded Freon that caters to small-time farmers and mechanics — those who don’t have the resources to retrofit the cooling systems in their tractors or long-haul trucks. Small businesses have even sprung up, staffed by teams that go undercover to buy these CFCs in order to play the California carbon market. Wilson’s account of his cross-country road trip to meet and talk with the buyers and sellers of Freon beautifully exemplifies the book’s tragic premise — with which I quite agree — that the road to Climate Hell was, and still is, paved with good intentions.

 

For example, John Gorrie’s 1851 design for the first air-conditioner was meant to provide better air circulation in cramped tenements and crowded classrooms, Wilson relates, but it didn’t work out that way. The first complete cooling system was not implemented in the inner city, but used — quite literally — to benefit the market: The first workers provided with air-conditioning were traders on the floor of the 1902 New York Stock Exchange. Since then, many of us have come to accept that for much of the year, the temperature inside our offices, homes, cars, malls and movie theaters will be strikingly cooler than the outdoors.

 

Our ability to dramatically cool the spaces we inhabit has changed the way we travel, consume food, use medicine, design our architecture and much more. But eventually, the chemical compounds used for this cooling cannot help leaking from coils and holding tanks as machines age and are discarded. Upon release, they form persistent greenhouse gases — meaning refrigeration as a practice makes an outsize contribution to global warming. In a supreme irony, one Wilson points out, our world before the adoption of institutional air-conditioning was cooler overall.

 

Wilson’s research for “After Cooling” was ambitious. “I needed to become more intimate with climate violence,” he writes in his prelude, and proceeds to tackle several controversial themes. He describes how the history of cooling personal and professional spaces is entwined with the history of racism and the institution of slavery. Before mechanical coolers were invented, enslaved children living in intemperate climes were forced to fan their oppressors for long hours, or to move air across containers of water in an effort to cool whole parlors and palaces. “One life was comforted at the expense of another,” Wilson writes with powerful simplicity. Today, he explains, the global socioeconomic gap between those who can effectively cool their surroundings and those who cannot is widening rapidly.

 

One issue that Wilson does not address, and that I wish he had: how changes in the Western diet have (or have not) influenced our perceived need for air-conditioning, as well as its use. Admittedly, the measurable increase in average personal insulation over the last 50 years is a prickly subject, but surely it’s relevant to any discussion of the ways we modify our personal space.

 

“After Cooling” has its greatest impact when it asks us to think deeply about the reasons humans wish to change the temperature of their surroundings. At one time, occasional sweating was simply accepted as a way of life, Wilson postulates, but now we regard comfort as a prerequisite for work and play. But what does it really mean to be comfortable? Is it merely the absence of discomfort, or is it something more? Is it a bodily experience or an emotional state? Wilson invites the reader into deep existential discussions by invoking broad themes of culture and philosophy — an unusual and delightful trait for a book on climate change. Particularly fascinating is Wilson’s examination of the marketing impulse behind the phrase “air conditioning,” as opposed to “air cooling” or something more concrete. Clearly, the production of a better “condition” of air, of better “conditions” for life, is the very definition of progress, isn’t it?

 

My main quibble with “After Cooling” is that the book seems at times to apologize for its very existence. Wilson notes that racism, misogyny and poverty have been vigorously acknowledged in the media recently and are beginning to be addressed at scales both large and small, and he contrasts this with how his friends and colleagues are simply “waiting for the topic to pass” whenever he brings up climate change. He also states that people find discussions of refrigerant management less “compelling” and “strangely impersonal” compared with climate strategies involving (say) electric vehicles or bioplastics. In response, I maintain that the quality of information and storytelling found in “After Cooling” contradicts the author on these very points.

 

Wilson dares to state plainly that lasting climate solutions hinge on our capacity to redefine what makes our lives meaningful, not on new technologies or better products. The first baby step may be as simple as experimenting with an air-conditioner on a hot July day, setting the room a few degrees higher than usual, and asking ourselves at bedtime whether we even noticed.

 

Hope Jahren is the author, most recently, of “The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here.”

 

The cost of cooling: how air conditioning is heating up the world

 

As temperatures rise, a new book delves into the environmental toll of America’s favorite way to cool off

 

Aliya Uteuova

Sun 25 Jul 2021 08.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/25/air-conditioning-climate-crisis-global-heating

 

The widespread reliance on air conditioning in the US is explored in Eric Dean Wilson’s book After Cooling: on Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. The book explores how air conditioning has become one of the most effective ways to cool off – and explains how harmful chemicals that make our lives comfortable also contribute to the climate crisis.

 

The modern refrigerant – gas in fridges, freezers and air conditioners – was first introduced in 1930s in the form of a chemical called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), better known as Freon. This chemical escaped into the air over time, ripping a hole in the ozone layer. In 1987, a global agreement was reached to ban the production of CFCs – although every year an ozone hole reappears over Antarctica in October.

 

HFCs, the chemicals that replaced the banned refrigerant, while not ozone-depleting, their global warming potential can be hundreds to thousands of times that of carbon dioxide. Today, the most commonly used refrigerant in air conditioners and cars is HCFC, which has much smaller ozone-depleting potential.

 

Wilson’s book is not a call to ditch air conditioners. He acknowledges that in a heatwave, refrigerants are life-saving. Prolonged hot temperatures can diminish people’s mental and physical capacity, and air conditioning is an effective heat management tool in classrooms. But before the widespread use of commercial air conditioning, our world was cooler – and in seeking comfort we have warmed our planet.

 

In an interview, Wilson reflects on the cost of American comfort.

 

So when I’m sitting 3ft away from a window AC unit, am I blasting harmful chemicals into my house or the atmosphere?

 

Air conditioners don’t consume or emit refrigerants directly. But what the chemical industry that produced air conditioners claimed was that they didn’t send Freon into the atmosphere. According to the industry, it was totally safe because it would never leak. Well, that’s not what happens. What happens, especially with car air conditioners, is that when a refrigerant is charged into a system, into an air conditioner, it slowly, over the course of like 15 years, leaks.

 

And even if it doesn’t, when getting rid of an air conditioner, the vast majority of people just pass it on the street, or put it in the dump, or something like that, which is technically illegal. But there’s no way to actually regulate that. Just walking down the street today, I saw two air window units just smashed on the street. It’s expensive to have somebody come and take care of them properly. And these units most likely have HFCs.

 

What was the alternative to CFCs once they were banned?

 

There are replacements like HFOs (hydrofluoroolefins) that don’t deplete the ozone layer. All evidence points to them being fine, but with each subsequent generation of refrigerants CFCs we’ve thought they were fine and they weren’t. I’m not a chemist, and I’m not an atmospheric scientist, but I see a pattern here that I’m quite skeptical of.

 

Can you speak about the reliance on AC during a heatwave?

 

In a heatwave, you have people who are susceptible to heat-related illnesses. These are people who tend to live in neighborhoods that have less access to natural shade, fewer trees, less access to parks, more asphalt that absorbs heat and can make areas of the city 10F hotter in some places.

 

Low-income residents are also more vulnerable. Even if they can afford the unit, they might be reluctant to turn it on because they might be behind on their energy bills. Also, what happens in the heatwave is that everyone in the city turns on their air conditioner, and it overloads the grid, and there’s a potential for blackouts.

 

One of the things that I write about very briefly in the book is pointing to the need for things like community solar, or community-controlled energy, rather than having a monopoly company that controls it. Because when profit is the driving motive, monopolies are not interested in saving lives.

 

What if we don’t want, or can’t afford, AC?

 

The most lo-tech solution is planting more trees. Initiatives to make sure that there is lush vegetation on every street in New York, especially in working-class neighborhoods, where there tend to be less trees, I think that’s crucial. Another solution is sustainable design that incorporates passive cooling. There are innovative architects who are looking at nature, things like termite mounds, beehives, things that exist in the wild and regulate temperature.

 

Understanding how to shade, how to give light, but without direct sunlight that will heat a room. Things like incorporating natural wind into a room, and using better building materials that don’t absorb heat. And these cooling strategies don’t have to be enormously expensive, so I have a lot of faith in good design.

 

What do you hope people take away from your book?

 

The vast majority of cooling in the United States is not for emergency situations. And it’s not even for situations that, I would argue, make our lives better. So what I’m asking is for us to really consider how our level of comfort and what we’ve defined as comfort has been constructed. And whether our level of comfort has actually led to a planet that’s uninhabitable. I’m not calling for all of us to suffer at all, I’m actually calling for us to again, to redefine what it means to be comfortable.