26 ms·

Air-conditioners do great good, but at a high environmental cost

271 points by lazerpants 8y ago

ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
I don't have a subscription currently so I didn't read the full article but I find it almost impossible to get any work done without air-conditioning on a very hot day so limiting their use seems impossible without also impacting productivity and economic output. For this reason the only solution seems to be either a technological breakthrough or the continuation of iterative efficiency gains.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  One could also just move to (northern coastal) California, but that has its own costs.
  - ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
    Globally speaking though it's not practical, possible or desirable to have everyone from a hot part of the world move to a cooler part. There will be countries where almost the entirety of it needs air-conditioning, in some cases 24/7/365, at least if they want to attain high economic growth. Could places like Hong Kong or Singapore be successful without air-conditioning tech?
    - a012 8y ago
      I've worked in many office buildings and they cut Air conditioning at 7PM
      - antisthenes 8y ago
        Yes, and those office workers then go home and turn on air conditioning there. The people need AC, not the buildings themselves.
        a012 8y ago
        Are you sure 100% workers in these countries turn their home AC on immediately after returning home?
        eric_the_read 8y ago
        I'd hope they turn them on an hour or so before they return home; otherwise, it's likely to be uncomfortable.
  - pimmen 8y ago
    There's three billion people living in the tropics. I don't know how closely you follow European politics, but letting all of them move to cooler climates simply because they can't stand the heat would upset quite a few in the populist movement over here.
  - mikestew 8y ago
    Why, they don't run A/C there? 'cuz they do in Seattle, which I find to be ridiculous. I keep a fleece vest in my office during the summer. There are going to be historians digging through our rubble, trying to figure out what happened four hundred years from now, and they're going to say, "they lived in a temperate climate where it rarely got above 80F, but they ran A/C non-stop for four months out of the year. No wonder the fucking ice caps melted." 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.
    - tjr225 8y ago
      I moved to Seattle from the midwest...the crying for A/C during 90 degree days with 0 humidity are laughable.
      - mikestew 8y ago
        Give it ten years. Born-and-bred Hoosier here, with a stop in North Carolina for a while. I am well acquainted with a hot, humid summer. I, too, once mocked the long-time residents in the PNW every summer. Then one day I woke up and found that I also find 85F to be a bit uncomfortable. I've grown soft, but at least I'm aware of it. :-)
    - tzs 8y ago
      Seattle may be over air-conditioned in offices, but when it comes to homes the story is quite different. 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 and the five highest: 99.5% New Orleans 99.3% Tampa 99.3% Austin 99.3% Las Vegas 99.2% Kansas City https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-is-least-air-conditioned-metro-area-in-the-u-s-census-data-show-so-how-do-locals-keep-cool/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-is-le...
      - 8y ago
- the_duke 8y ago
  Just open in a private browser window to circumvent the 1 article per month limit.
  - ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
    Thanks, I just tried this, it didn't work at first. Then I closed the private window and clicked refresh in the original window and it appeared. Not sure why that worked.
    - the_duke 8y ago
      That sounds like some weird interaction or bug of the private mode. Which browser are you using? 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.
      - ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
        Chrome 68.0.3440.106
- chrisBob 8y ago
  I agree that AC is important and helps lots of people, but the impact can certainly be reduced. People adapt remarkably to warm/cold conditions, but the barrier of pushing through for a day or two is difficult. The only reason offices/homes need to be 72 all summer is that the home/office is 72 all summer so changing the other feel unbearably hot. If you would actually give it a chance you would be comfortable at 80 all summer and 65 all winter. 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.
  - free652 8y ago
    80f with 30% humidity = no problem. 80f with 70% humidity = hello no, won’t get used to that.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Humanity had millennia of lower productivity summers before a/c. Do we really need to be 100% productive year round? Would giving summers off to more job categories maybe boost employee morale and things like hobby/vacation spending? 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?
  - ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
    This may work in Europe or other northern countries but some countries are hot (35 degrees Celsius / 95 Fahrenheit) all the time. A summer off to hobby/vacation would mean never working.
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      Certainly, a/c also allowed humanity to live healthier in more places than ever before. Like I said, it's mostly an interesting thought experiment, especially because you can often look up what life was like in your area before a/c. In many cases none of us want to return to 100% of that lifestyle, but sometimes there are interesting answers there. 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.
overcast 8y ago
Let's focus more on the worthless wastes of energy like cryptocurrency, and less on life saving ones like air conditioning. The latter does FAR more right than wrong. Should we have more energy efficient machines, and less harmful chemicals? Of course. But out of ALL of the technology to write about, air conditioning contributing to environmental destruction should be on the bottom of the list. When it's 120F inside a tin can house in India, you go tell those people they should be laying off the harmful AC while you're trading imaginary internet coins.
- stuaxo 8y ago
  We can do both, making air conditioning more efficient requires time so we should start now.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Indeed. Simply keep providing feed in tarrifs for renewables, thereby ensuring cryptomining and AC are both paying their "fair share" for receiving clean energy. Not that regulation isn't important (ie Energy Star), but market signals are important as well. In a perfect world, a refundable carbon tax fixes all of this, but we don't live in a perfect world.
    - mbrumlow 8y ago
      ACs have improved leaps and bounds over the last 20 years. I don't think we need any extra effort into this. The nature of the beast is to lower cost while providing a good product. It is simply what customers will demand. On the other hand, bitcoin is an issue, and it is only going to get worse. No need to split focus until that beast is tamed.
      - deleted 8y ago
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      - chongli 8y ago
        No need to split focus until that beast is tamed. What do you mean by that? Are we as a society not able to do more than one thing at a time?
pimmen 8y ago
In the Nordic countries, we just can't survive without our heating. Without it, we could probably not produce as much during the winter as we do now. Even with triple pane glass being the norm up here, we still consume massive amounts of energy every winter to keep warm. People are genuinely scared of having variable utility prices and many rather opt for a fixed price for a fixed time period, because you never know if you're going to have a really harsh winter, like we did this one that saw enormous amounts of snow. If we could use the radiators and central heating to transform our countries into economic power houses, I don't see how we have the right to stop countries in the tropics from making virtually the same journey, albeit with cooling rather than heating.
HillaryBriss 8y ago
At current rates, Saudi Arabia will be using more energy to run air-conditioners in 2030 than it now exports as oil. There are 33 million people in Saudi Arabia.
deleted 8y ago
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daxorid 8y ago
Why do articles like these never mention the fact that air conditioners are heat pumps, and therefore quite a bit more efficient at cooling than oil or electric furnaces are at heating? I rarely see similar articles bemoaning the carbon emissions associated with heating, say, wealthy New England apartments. It's always those damn poor people in the South ruining the environment.
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  I think people have an assumption that sweltering heat may be uncomfortable, but is "less likely" to kill you compared to 20 degree weather. I don't know if that's even remotely true. Also keep in mind the vast majority of people heating their New England apartments are NOT wealthy, by the simple fact that the majority of New Englanders are not wealthy
  - deleted 8y ago
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- panzagl 8y ago
  The also have important secondary uses for controlling humidity and air quality- I may add A/C to my house just to filter out the smoke that is increasingly common every summer.
- tristor 8y ago
  Your comment is pretty much on point. It's unfortunate, but true, that most of the environmental hand-wringing is coming from people who live /worse/ lifestyles for the environment than those they are indicting, and there's definitely a cultural elitism aspect as part of it as well. Somewhat ironically, there is a strong correlation between the type of people who hand-wring about the environment and opposition to nuclear energy despite it being safer and more efficient than any other form of energy generation currently. It'd be nice if people aligned their principles and policy positions with what they say, but practicing what you preach has rarely ever been in vogue.
- Xarodon 8y ago
  therefore quite a bit more efficient at cooling than oil or electric furnaces are at heating? To be pedantic, nothing is more energy efficient than electric heat. All of the electricity that's lost due to inefficiencies in the device turns into heat anyways. Electric heat is the closest thing to 100% efficient we'll ever get. Whether it's economical, or the best choice is a different matter, but it's certainly energy efficient.
jimmaswell 8y ago
> Without drastic improvements in air-conditioners’ efficiency, the IEA reckons, they will be burning up 6,000 TWhs by 2050. I feel like future improvements in the efficiency and greenness of energy production have the potential to offset increasing energy demands. We could solve much of this faster if we'd just properly utilize nuclear, but politics get in the way of using efficient designs and public perception is unfairly negative despite it being the safest of all energy production methods[1]. If electric vehicles gain more traction then the emissions from the transport of materials for nuclear etc. also stop being a factor. Side note, I hate this font they use that makes a 1 look like a seriffed I. Unnecessarily hard to read. 1: https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy
- maltalex 8y ago
  The problem with energy efficiency is that it paradoxically tends to increase consumption. There’s a basic economic aspect we mustn’t forget - supply and demand. When energy prices drop, consumers often buy more if it. I’m on mobile so I don’t have a link at hand, but I recall reading that people drove a lot less when gas prices were higher. When they went back down, people went back to driving more. If you really want to lower energy consumption- just raise the price.
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    Lowering energy consumption isn't the end goal, lowering harmful emissions is. If in the future, energy is produced entirely by solar, hydro, and nuclear, vehicles/machinery use little or no fossil fuels, and air conditioners have continued to be improved wrt use of coolant/leakage, then there's no need to reduce consumption because consumption is harmless. In the meantime, pricing poor people out of electric is not a good solution.
    - njarboe 8y ago
      At some point waste heat itself will warm the planet enough to matter. With exponential growth one can get there pretty quickly. A few hundred years. At some point we should add a heat tax to compliment the carbon tax (that we should already have in place).
chosenbreed 8y ago
Interesting...there a few comments putting forward the case for energy expenditure to provide heating and cooling. Can't really argue with any of them. However, I wonder how much of the need is driven by the modern lifestyles we have now. I appreciate that the planet is getting warmer (and that perhaps we're seeing more severe winters) but how did people get by 100 years ago? Or a 1000 years ago? How did people survive the heat? How did they survive the cold? We can't turn back the clock but perhaps there's something to gain by looking at the past...
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > How did people survive the heat? How did they survive the cold? Well they often didn’t. People still die from cold winters and hot summers, especially old people. Air conditioning and heating is not a luxury for some of these people.
  - dcx 8y ago
    This. I'm from a tropical country. My grandmother told me stories about plantation work back in the day - people used to literally drop dead from the heat all the time.
- venantius 8y ago
  Well, in the past we (a) died younger and (b) burned a lot of things for heat. I'd argue that literally nobody wants to go back to (a), and if every household in the world was still burnings a stove to stay warm we'd have an even worse global warming situation than we currently have.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    > and if every household in the world was still burnings a stove to stay warm we'd have an even worse global warming situation than we currently have. Speaking of burning things in stoves, this reminds me of a way to get people to burn all sorts of nasty things in wood stoves: Tax the crap out of electrical energy and/or fossil fuels. Make people pay a lot to dispose of their trash. It's good to remember that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
dragonwriter 8y ago
We probably don't need to do much of anything about air conditioning specifically, we just need to price in the externalities of energy use generally. But it might make sense to incentivize (whether through positive incentives or negative incentives on traditional AC, or both) use of geothermal heat pumps instead of air-source heat pumps, since the latter is, pretty much by definition, least efficient when most needed—long-term, they are already a net win for the consumer as well as the environment, but the payoff time is long enough and traditional AC culturally-established enough that it doesn't even tend to be considered as an option enough.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  It is probably cheaper, and more fungible, to incentivize clean renewables generation for AC use than expensive ground loops for geothermal/in-ground heat pumps. Clean energy can be used for anything, but sunk copper or plastic piping in the ground on a property is fairly constrained in what it can be used for.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  In Toronto we have this huge system of underground cooling that transfers cool from the lake. It's great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_water_source_cooling#First_system_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_water_source_cooling#Firs...
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    Double great because it only cools using water that the city was planning on using anyway. If they heated the water up and sent it back into Lake Ontario, the temperature differential would have a drastic impact on the wildlife in the area.
  - gtdawg 8y ago
    Pretty cool! One thing to note is the cooling capacity is limited to the consumption rate of the city based on how it's designed right now. > The cold water drawn from Lake Ontario's deep layer in the Enwave system is not returned directly to the lake once it has been run through the heat exchange system. The Enwave system only uses water that is destined to meet the city's domestic water needs. Therefore, the Enwave system does not pollute the lake with a plume of waste heat.
RobertSmith 8y ago
We are cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable.
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  And to heat the part that isn’t.
legitster 8y ago
I am very skeptical. Air conditioning has enabled large amounts of people to move from cold climates to warm climates (places like Dallas and Hong Kong basically wouldn't exist like they do without it). And there is a lot more energy spent heating in the north than there is cooling in the south. So on average, I would assume there is a net benefit if you consider the tradeoffs. I think there is a stigma people have that heating is essential for life, but A/C is optional. But we should really compare them against each other.
- ex-pralite-monk 8y ago
  I grew up in central Florida in the 1960s. Our house and many of our school rooms didn't have air conditioning until the mid 1970s. It's doable: brick school rooms are a decent insulator. Jalousie windows in every house.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Shivetya 8y ago
  plus there is still a lot of heating done with oil and even coal in some places. the temperature difference alone should point to heating being more expensive. (going from freezing to acceptable is a lot more energy than from hot to the same temperature). throw in the added benefit of AC is humidity control and AC is just a win win tech.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Humility makes this less true than you would think. AC’s drip water because they condescend it from the air which takes lots of energy.
    - r_smart 8y ago
      I can't tell if this is a weird attempt at a pun, a funny typo, or some kind of koan.
725686 8y ago
Whenever I go to the USA, I just hate how cold (summer)/hot (winter) are the malls and other closed spaces. Why can't they set it at a reasonable temp? I'm sure that will help a bit to reduce energy waste.
- izzydata 8y ago
  I don't know of many malls that still exist, but I often find that most large enclosed spaces set a temperature and leave it at that 24/7 365. It is often about 70-75.
kalleboo 8y ago
> Without drastic improvements in air-conditioners’ efficiency The biggest gain in air conditioner efficiency is not in the air conditioner itself, but in the housing it is used in. In Asia, lots of housing is built cheaply with terrible insulation, so the air conditioning is burning electricity in waste to cool the great outdoors.
- jay-anderson 8y ago
  I heard on the radio recently that even though cities have been growing the overall water usage hasn't grown with it. The report attributed it to more efficient toilets. If cities required better insulation would we see a similar effect or are there better things to attack in general? It makes sense that moving from terrible insulation to decent insulation would be a good move. Do we know how good? Have there been estimates on the savings? How about moving from decent insulation to excellent insulation?
  - soundwave106 8y ago
    From what I'm seeing, moving from terrible insulation to decent insulation is an excellent idea. Moving from decent insulation to excellent insulation... maybe not so much. There is a point of diminishing returns where more R values in your insulation does not gain you much. According to this fact sheet from the North Carolina energy office: https://files.nc.gov/ncdeq/Environmental%20Assistance%20and%20Customer%20Service/IAS%20Energy%20Efficiency/Opportunities/Insulation_Guidelines.pdf https://files.nc.gov/ncdeq/Environmental%20Assistance%20and%... "Insulation installation which brings a building up to standard can result in a savings of 1—5% of HVAC costs depending on the conditions before the improvements are implemented." However, if you combine insulation with inspecting ductwork / windows / doors / attics and plugging as many air leaks as practically possible, the estimated savings rate rises considerably. Energystar's site (https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=home_sealing.hm_improvement_methodology https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=home_sealing.hm_impro...) for instance estimates 11% of utility bill savings with a combination of methods.
pro_zac 8y ago
Not totally on topic, but the thing that shocks me as ridiculously inefficient is huge freezer aisles in grocery stores in cold climates. They heat the store and then cool the freezers. Can't they just pump in outside air? Granted this wouldn't work year round in many places, but I feel like there is a better solution.
- alkonaut 8y ago
  Freezers provide heat outside the freezer - which is in the store. So while not the most efficient kind of heating it’s not “heat the store and cool the freezers”. 1kWh spent cooling a fridge is 1kWh heat added to the store. (This depends on where the freezer heat exchangers are)
  - pro_zac 8y ago
    That makes sense. So it is better to have freezers running in a store you are trying to heat up than one you are trying to cool. I had it completely backward.
    - julbaxter 8y ago
      No, you had it right. You need to cool the freezer because you put it in the store. The more you heat the store (and the freezer is heating the store), the more you need to cool the freezer.
lbriner 8y ago
The good thing about AC is that it generates heat as a by-product but in most cases, this is not used. Imagine if local air-con could provide all of a hospital/school/government building's hot water (and heating since they tend to roast in the UK). Perhaps there is a market for a company that links the air-con user and local large users of hot water or even factories that need heat for their work.
- ryanmarsh 8y ago
  Yes heat exchangers are well understood. You're mainly talking about the condenser side of an HVAC system. Cooling towers have been around a while. I imagine you'd need a hybrid approach. I doubt you'll find many buildings where the hot water needs are 1:1 with the waste heat from the HVAC system. Now you have two problems. Your hot water heater just got really complex. However, building codes could mandate that energy for heating water first come from waste heat from the HVAC system. That would drive innovation in the space and who knows maybe it would become common. It's kind of like killing a fly with a hammer though, plus existing structures would get grandfathered in. Energy generation seem to me to be the better bang for the buck. What would be really awesome is if someone invented a very efficient industrial thermoelectric generator that could be used in the condenser of an HVAC system. Think, regenerative breaking.
scarejunba 8y ago
Nobody is going to listen to people in heated homes asking other people to stop cooling their homes. It's not going to happen. According to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421508005168 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142150... cooling will exceed heating in 2060. So the real problem here are rich cold countries.
vanderZwan 8y ago
I have one "problem" with airconditioning: it's a "cure" for cooling down a building after it heats up too much, but the more cost-effective, sustainable solution is prevention. If we prioritize battling the urban heat island effect first, the remaining temperature problems can be tackled at a much lower energy cost with with airco. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island [1] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities-1-the-solar-envelope.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities... [2] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities-2-solar-access-in-19th-century-cities.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities... [3] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities-3-housing-density.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities...
- Reason077 8y ago
  Isn't the "urban heat island" effect a fundamental property of the way we've designed and built our cities? To fix it, wouldn't we need to redesign buildings to have things like green roofs and use construction materials that reflect heat. And we'd have to tear up much of our paving and roads and replace them with trees, water, and green space. That all sounds nice, and it's a good principle to consider when designing new urban areas. But it's extremely expensive and disruptive to go rebuilding existing cities, and all the construction itself would have an environmental cost. Surely air conditioning is cheaper?
  - hinkley 8y ago
    First thing to do is stop making the problem worse. Last I checked we are still building our cities. Mine is in the process of knocking down all the one story commercial space and replacing it with six story mixed use buildings.
    - Reason077 8y ago
      Increasing density in urban areas by building up is the right thing to do, compared to expanding urban areas which would require more paving, more roads, and more inefficient use of land. It's the way we design those new buildings that's important.
kqr2 8y ago
Is geothermal hvac a more efficient option? Has it been used in large buildings? https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/great-energy-challenge/2013/10-myths-about-geothermal-heating-and-cooling/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/great-energy-...
thinkcontext 8y ago
The amount of harm from refrigerants, the chemicals used in cooling systems to move heat around, is vastly underappreciated so its good to see it mentioned. "HFCs trap between 1,000 and 9,000 times as much heat as the same amount of CO2, meaning they are much more potent causes of global warming. On this basis, Paul Hawken of Project Drawdown, a think-tank, calculates that improving air-conditioners could do more than anything else to reduce greenhouse gases."
- Tharkun 8y ago
  There are heat pumps which use CO2 as their refrigerant. Apparently they are more efficient (and less potentially hazardous for people and climate) than most alternatives.
  - thinkcontext 8y ago
    From what I've seen it's used in water heater heat pumps, not space heating and cooling. Perhaps with tighter regulations on HFCs CO2 will be more widely used.
userbinator 8y ago
The ironic thing about the replacement of CFCs is that the replacement refrigerants have all tended to be less efficient, toxic, flammable, or a combination of all those. One has to wonder how the environmental effects of the latter compare.
j45 8y ago
Having more available productive hours per day in hot climates helps everyone get further in their lives, however they may choose. I didn't grow up with A/C, but it's definitely the one thing I don't hesitate to turn on when needed. It would help if air conditioning technology could innovate and improve immensely to attack some of the valid issues it has.
johngalt 8y ago
A/C consumes less energy than heating. A/C is effectively a closed system when operating. A fireplace or furnace is not. A/C is needed most in places and times where solar panels work the best. Heating is the opposite. Objectively living in Maine has a significantly higher environmental cost than living in Arizona.
- saudioger 8y ago
  Especially once you consider that in some places (New England) you have people living in both extremes. So they're using heat in the winter AND air conditioning in the summer. New England winters are on average colder than some places near the arctic circle (Iceland for example) and summers get hotter than many places in the US as well.
  - DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    I live in New England, and the situation is definitely a little complex. Some factors where I live: - Firewood is really cheap. My house uses oil for its primary heating, but we supplement with a wood stove because aesthetics and cheap heat. - A lot of the summer it's not the heat that gets you, more the humidity. We run A/C a lot, but often we could get by with just better dehumidifiers whose waste-heat stayed outside the house. - Only relatively new houses have central A/C and/or dehumidifiers. Older houses tend to use window-mounted A/C's, which are less efficient and less appealing. Unfortunately retrofitting a house with central A/C can be outside many people's budgets. - At my latitude, we get enough sunlight to make roof-mounted solar panels worthwhile for many people. But the financial break-even time can be pretty long, and there don't always seem to be government-subsidized low-interest loans to help.
    - saudioger 8y ago
      Ah firewood is nice. I live in a dense urban area and we wouldn't really have the option. We're on an electric heat pump for heating/cooling/dehumidifying (it's a nice system, a little expensive, but better than resistance electric heat and window units). We're in an old house without ducts, and compared to traditional systems it was cheap to install ($10k for 1500 ft sq).
manishas 8y ago
Everything in life is a calculation and needs to be balanced. We need to encourage people and businesses to use their ACs only when required, but at the end of the day, we need to find better ways of saving the environment while still supporting 7B people on the planet to live reasonably comfortably.
Reedx 8y ago
Something I've long wondered about: Do restaurants, malls and movie theaters need to be that damn cold? Does it really increase sales that much? It's a major pet peeve of mine. Office buildings are often much cooler than they need to be too. I think most places, including homes, could reduce A/C significantly.
- branchless 8y ago
  Does anyone really care about the environment? It's in front of our eyes every day. Supermarkets have superfluous packaging. They have fridges without any doors on pumping out cold air constantly. We have advertisements sucking energy constantly. Bitcoin uses a significant chunk of the world electricity? It's "innovative"! Massive commutes to completely pointless jobs where companies compete to deliver the pointless service before employees travel 90 minutes back to their inadequately insulated home. If someone came down from space to visit us and we said we are trying to fix the environment they'd laugh. We are in this mess because our system inexorably leads to it. We've been in this mess since we adopted this system. We have to ditch it.
- grasshopperpurp 8y ago
  Living in Florida, we keep our AC at 78 - which is what a representative of our local energy company suggested. For two humans, and two dogs, it's comfortable. When we have company, we kick it down to 76 - or 74 if someone is cooking.
- JimboOmega 8y ago
  When I got my first job the excuse I heard for the office being so cold is that it is chilled for men in suits (with jackets on). Which is definitely not how most employees are dressed in the summer!
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
  Part of the problem is humidity removal. There are many times when I'll lower the thermostat even though the temperature is already at 76F, but I need to get the humidity lower in order to make the room/house comfortable. It's especially the case at night where, if the humidity were lower, I'd just turn off A/C and open the windows.
billfruit 8y ago
I am ever amazed at the usage fahrenheit in the US. Do even the weather reports state temp like in fahrenheit? Also sometimes wonder if the weather reports should be tell ing wet bulb temperatures, because it also gives an indication of humidity.
- 21 8y ago
  > sometimes wonder if the weather reports should be tell ing wet bulb temperatures This is why many reports or apps have "feels like X degrees"
- klodolph 8y ago
  > I am ever amazed at the usage fahrenheit in the US. Do even the weather reports state temp like in fahrenheit? Yes, but why should this be amazing?
  - kragen 8y ago
    Because it's been obsolete for half a century. The insistence of the US on using archaic systems of measurement, despite the substantial extra difficulty of calculation and attendant errors resulting in the occasional loss of space probes and the like, is a source of continuous amusement and frustration for the rest of the world.
    - jazzyjackson 8y ago
      Luckily the average American isn't doing any calculation based on the weather. We just want to know if its hella hot (100) or hella cold (0)
    - innocentfelon 8y ago
      Using similar logic, you could argue all countries need to get with the program and speak English. Or use US dollars. Or (yikes) Microsoft Windows. America’s quaint and annoying reliance on feet, inches, miles, and pounds is culturally important, even if it makes engineering a pain.
nwah1 8y ago
I'm surprised that there isn't some kind of huge multi-billion dollar prize to improve air conditioners. Environmental groups have so much money, and they waste it lobbying for bans on plastic straws. How about some R&D, please.
deleted 8y ago
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- gesticulator 8y ago
  Do you have examples of a low-tech gravity train? From what I know there's serious limitations to this tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_train#Objections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_train#Objections
robdachshund 8y ago
I'd say ac is a net positive when it allows for the refrigeration and freezing of food. Less food is wasted, and food can be bought in bulk which means people aren't driving to a market everyday.
yourapostasy 8y ago
Scrolled through comments up to time of writing this, and didn't see much discussion of the low-hanging fruit still available to reduce A/C-related electrical demand in the US. Commenters are bringing up insulation, but not in detail. We need the PassivHaus insulation standard with droplet-based air tightness treatment (that brings the air tightness to about twice or better than PassivHaus specifies) as the minimum required. Ideally, city-scale recycling centers would redirect used styrofoam to re-form with limonene into insulating blocks, keeping it out of landfills and oceans, and entrain into a more permanent use. Real estate industry needs go along; advertise and market that 4-8 foot thick insulation in walls are attractive for starters. 3-6 inch gap rain screen on all outside surfaces, white or light-colored reflective takes out ~5 degrees F of cooling effort with completely passive design. Overrule all HOAs and city building codes nationwide at the federal level, and anyone who wants to re-position their property improvement to take advantage of the solar path may do so without seeking permission. That is, the footprint alignment of any planned improvement (new or modification) that is aligned with a federally-published local solar path is an instant "shall-issue" permit; the actual footprint size, dimensions, permeable cover ratio, etc. still goes through normal permitting processes. Anyone who wants to build long-overhang porches that screen out all but the last X minutes of sunrise or sunset may do so without seeking permission. Overrule all local jurisdictions at the federal level, and any enclosed space that does not use A/C, that is, only has dehumidification (no active cooling) and/or ceiling fans, do not count in property taxes, or count for something like 10% of normal assessment.
phonz 8y ago
AC can use refrigerants that are not pollutants. Also AC by definition can always be solar powered. This is literally a non-issue. Here’s a question: why do we not shelter our homes and buildings? It doesn’t make any sense to let the sun bake the house and then continually refrigerate the inside of it. Just string some cloth or literally any material over the house with an air gap. It would cost almost nothing compared the the total cost of the house and it would save tons of money on cooling alone. So why isn’t it done? Well it is, but if your shade structure isn’t organic and green leafed, you get run out of town. Such a shame. We need some kind of artificial tree.
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
  What if you like the view? You can't consider these things in isolation from other factors.
  - phonz 8y ago
    I don’t understand. The view would be the same. It would be the same as having as having roofs. Just slightly raised and maybe a different color. No problem with views.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
      When I read "over the house" I was thinking that this shield would go around the house. Most of the heat entering my house is through the walls and windows. There's a huge air gap and thick insulation below the roof, so that's not much of a problem.
      - phonz 8y ago
        A little overhang would solve that mostly.
forapurpose 8y ago
Some tips to minimize a/c usage with zero loss of comfort: 1. You only need you to be cool, not the entire room or building. Find solutions that cool you - including wearing cool, loose-fitting clothing. It's absurd to warm yourself up by trapping body heat and then to use an a/c unit to cool the entire room / suite / building in order to cool yourself down again. 2. Use fans; enjoy the pleasures of a gentle breeze. Convection is a powerful thing, and unless the ambient air is warmer than your body temperature, the breeze probably will cool you off. The new tower fans are especially effective and user-friendly - they aren't ugly, you don't need to attach them to anything and they don't need much clearance, and the breeze is well-attenuated. Their effect is surprisingly powerful. 3. Imagine what temperature would be comfortable for sitting outside, in the shade, with a breeze (see #2). 26-27C (~79-81F)? A little lower? A little higher? Maybe even experiment a little, and set your thermostat to that temperature. 4. Never turn on the a/c if it's cool enough outside (see #3). If you need more air exchange with the outside, get an exhaust fan. 5. Open the windows when it's cool outside, then as soon as it starts warming up - probably at sunrise - close them. (I wish there was a home automation system that would do it for me). Even on ~30C+ (86F+) days, that's been enough to keep the place cool until mid-afternoon. 6. If none of that is enough, turn on the a/c. I'll bet you won't want it nearly as often. I'd guess that we've cut our a/c usage by ~80% with zero impact on our comfort.
ekianjo 8y ago
Energy-wise, Airconditioning is quite cheap. In Japan we use "aircon" pretty much all the time in summer (it's really, really hard to live without when it's 35C+ in 90% humidity) yet the electricity bills are much more reasonable compared to what we need to pay in winter when we need to heat up the place (temporarily only).
williesleg 8y ago
What does Al Gore do?
drewmol 8y ago
In case anyone else was curious - According to various internet sources: [0]"according to a 1958 NASA report people can live indefinitely in environments that range between roughly 40 degrees F and 95 degrees F (4 and 35 degrees C), if the latter temperature occurs at no more than 50 percent relative humidity." [0]https://www.livescience.com/34131-infographic-limits-of-human-survival.html https://www.livescience.com/34131-infographic-limits-of-huma...
mirimir 8y ago
With global climate change, energy use for air conditioning will arguably increase. Given the timing, it's a good use for PV. But to the extent that CO2 emissions result, you have a positive feedback.
j1vms 8y ago
Don't tell anyone that thinks A/C comes at a high environmental cost, anything about what would be needed to make Mars viable for even a single person to stay there. They might blow a gasket. Forget about if we get to building a small village on the Red Planet.
basicplus2 8y ago
Reverse cycle arconditioners use between 3 to 5x more power than a dedicated cooling system in cooling mode or a dedicated heating system in heating mode
zanethomas 8y ago
In 1955, when I was 5 years old, my family moved to Pasadena, CA. There was no air conditioning anywhere I can recall, definitely not at home or at school. I moved to Seattle about 30 years later. I returned to Southern California a few years ago and was surprised to find that most people here think they can't live without air-conditioning.
toastermoster 8y ago
I've often wondered how feasible it would be to combine thermal storage with battery storage and solar energy production. During the winter such a system could heat water while producing excess solar power and during the summer maybe produce ice with excess solar power during. I wonder if that could be more efficient than storing chemical energy through batteries alone.
baybal2 8y ago
The story with aircon efficiency is the same as with heating in high latitudes. Building with high volume, aspect ratio and thermal insulation are more efficient, but very few high rises are made like that: luxury high rises are made for people who can bang few hundred bucks per month on heating/cooling just to have panoramic windows, and cheapest high rises are made with a single consideration of maximising kilobucks per square metre. Were building codes to enforce energy efficiency, builders of luxury high rises will scream murder. What I calculated with my level of math, it is safe to say that proper insulation, reducing glazing to 30-40% of the facade, and proper central air conditioning will drop energy use of a 40 storey high rise by 30 to 40 percents.

271 points by lazerpants 8y ago

I don't have a subscription currently so I didn't read the full article but I find it almost impossible to get any work done without air-conditioning on a very hot day so limiting their use seems impossible without also impacting productivity and economic output. For this reason the only solution seems to be either a technological breakthrough or the continuation of iterative efficiency gains.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
One could also just move to (northern coastal) California, but that has its own costs.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
  Globally speaking though it's not practical, possible or desirable to have everyone from a hot part of the world move to a cooler part. There will be countries where almost the entirety of it needs air-conditioning, in some cases 24/7/365, at least if they want to attain high economic growth. Could places like Hong Kong or Singapore be successful without air-conditioning tech?
  - a012 8y ago
    I've worked in many office buildings and they cut Air conditioning at 7PM
    - antisthenes 8y ago
      Yes, and those office workers then go home and turn on air conditioning there. The people need AC, not the buildings themselves.
      - a012 8y ago
        Are you sure 100% workers in these countries turn their home AC on immediately after returning home?
        eric_the_read 8y ago
        I'd hope they turn them on an hour or so before they return home; otherwise, it's likely to be uncomfortable.
- pimmen 8y ago
  There's three billion people living in the tropics. I don't know how closely you follow European politics, but letting all of them move to cooler climates simply because they can't stand the heat would upset quite a few in the populist movement over here.
- mikestew 8y ago
  Why, they don't run A/C there? 'cuz they do in Seattle, which I find to be ridiculous. I keep a fleece vest in my office during the summer. There are going to be historians digging through our rubble, trying to figure out what happened four hundred years from now, and they're going to say, "they lived in a temperate climate where it rarely got above 80F, but they ran A/C non-stop for four months out of the year. No wonder the fucking ice caps melted." 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.
  - tjr225 8y ago
    I moved to Seattle from the midwest...the crying for A/C during 90 degree days with 0 humidity are laughable.
    - mikestew 8y ago
      Give it ten years. Born-and-bred Hoosier here, with a stop in North Carolina for a while. I am well acquainted with a hot, humid summer. I, too, once mocked the long-time residents in the PNW every summer. Then one day I woke up and found that I also find 85F to be a bit uncomfortable. I've grown soft, but at least I'm aware of it. :-)
  - tzs 8y ago
    Seattle may be over air-conditioned in offices, but when it comes to homes the story is quite different. 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 and the five highest: 99.5% New Orleans 99.3% Tampa 99.3% Austin 99.3% Las Vegas 99.2% Kansas City https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-is-least-air-conditioned-metro-area-in-the-u-s-census-data-show-so-how-do-locals-keep-cool/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-is-le...
    - 8y ago
the_duke 8y ago
Just open in a private browser window to circumvent the 1 article per month limit.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
  Thanks, I just tried this, it didn't work at first. Then I closed the private window and clicked refresh in the original window and it appeared. Not sure why that worked.
  - the_duke 8y ago
    That sounds like some weird interaction or bug of the private mode. Which browser are you using? 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.
    - ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
      Chrome 68.0.3440.106
chrisBob 8y ago
I agree that AC is important and helps lots of people, but the impact can certainly be reduced. People adapt remarkably to warm/cold conditions, but the barrier of pushing through for a day or two is difficult. The only reason offices/homes need to be 72 all summer is that the home/office is 72 all summer so changing the other feel unbearably hot. If you would actually give it a chance you would be comfortable at 80 all summer and 65 all winter. 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.
- free652 8y ago
  80f with 30% humidity = no problem. 80f with 70% humidity = hello no, won’t get used to that.
WorldMaker 8y ago
Humanity had millennia of lower productivity summers before a/c. Do we really need to be 100% productive year round? Would giving summers off to more job categories maybe boost employee morale and things like hobby/vacation spending? 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?
- ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
  This may work in Europe or other northern countries but some countries are hot (35 degrees Celsius / 95 Fahrenheit) all the time. A summer off to hobby/vacation would mean never working.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    Certainly, a/c also allowed humanity to live healthier in more places than ever before. Like I said, it's mostly an interesting thought experiment, especially because you can often look up what life was like in your area before a/c. In many cases none of us want to return to 100% of that lifestyle, but sometimes there are interesting answers there. 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.

overcast 8y ago

Let's focus more on the worthless wastes of energy like cryptocurrency, and less on life saving ones like air conditioning. The latter does FAR more right than wrong. Should we have more energy efficient machines, and less harmful chemicals? Of course. But out of ALL of the technology to write about, air conditioning contributing to environmental destruction should be on the bottom of the list. When it's 120F inside a tin can house in India, you go tell those people they should be laying off the harmful AC while you're trading imaginary internet coins.

stuaxo 8y ago
We can do both, making air conditioning more efficient requires time so we should start now.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Indeed. Simply keep providing feed in tarrifs for renewables, thereby ensuring cryptomining and AC are both paying their "fair share" for receiving clean energy. Not that regulation isn't important (ie Energy Star), but market signals are important as well. In a perfect world, a refundable carbon tax fixes all of this, but we don't live in a perfect world.
  - mbrumlow 8y ago
    ACs have improved leaps and bounds over the last 20 years. I don't think we need any extra effort into this. The nature of the beast is to lower cost while providing a good product. It is simply what customers will demand. On the other hand, bitcoin is an issue, and it is only going to get worse. No need to split focus until that beast is tamed.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - chongli 8y ago
      No need to split focus until that beast is tamed. What do you mean by that? Are we as a society not able to do more than one thing at a time?

pimmen 8y ago

In the Nordic countries, we just can't survive without our heating. Without it, we could probably not produce as much during the winter as we do now. Even with triple pane glass being the norm up here, we still consume massive amounts of energy every winter to keep warm. People are genuinely scared of having variable utility prices and many rather opt for a fixed price for a fixed time period, because you never know if you're going to have a really harsh winter, like we did this one that saw enormous amounts of snow. If we could use the radiators and central heating to transform our countries into economic power houses, I don't see how we have the right to stop countries in the tropics from making virtually the same journey, albeit with cooling rather than heating.

HillaryBriss 8y ago

At current rates, Saudi Arabia will be using more energy to run air-conditioners in 2030 than it now exports as oil. There are 33 million people in Saudi Arabia.

deleted 8y ago

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daxorid 8y ago

Why do articles like these never mention the fact that air conditioners are heat pumps, and therefore quite a bit more efficient at cooling than oil or electric furnaces are at heating? I rarely see similar articles bemoaning the carbon emissions associated with heating, say, wealthy New England apartments. It's always those damn poor people in the South ruining the environment.

mrguyorama 8y ago
I think people have an assumption that sweltering heat may be uncomfortable, but is "less likely" to kill you compared to 20 degree weather. I don't know if that's even remotely true. Also keep in mind the vast majority of people heating their New England apartments are NOT wealthy, by the simple fact that the majority of New Englanders are not wealthy
- deleted 8y ago
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panzagl 8y ago
The also have important secondary uses for controlling humidity and air quality- I may add A/C to my house just to filter out the smoke that is increasingly common every summer.
tristor 8y ago
Your comment is pretty much on point. It's unfortunate, but true, that most of the environmental hand-wringing is coming from people who live /worse/ lifestyles for the environment than those they are indicting, and there's definitely a cultural elitism aspect as part of it as well. Somewhat ironically, there is a strong correlation between the type of people who hand-wring about the environment and opposition to nuclear energy despite it being safer and more efficient than any other form of energy generation currently. It'd be nice if people aligned their principles and policy positions with what they say, but practicing what you preach has rarely ever been in vogue.
Xarodon 8y ago
therefore quite a bit more efficient at cooling than oil or electric furnaces are at heating? To be pedantic, nothing is more energy efficient than electric heat. All of the electricity that's lost due to inefficiencies in the device turns into heat anyways. Electric heat is the closest thing to 100% efficient we'll ever get. Whether it's economical, or the best choice is a different matter, but it's certainly energy efficient.

jimmaswell 8y ago

> Without drastic improvements in air-conditioners’ efficiency, the IEA reckons, they will be burning up 6,000 TWhs by 2050. I feel like future improvements in the efficiency and greenness of energy production have the potential to offset increasing energy demands. We could solve much of this faster if we'd just properly utilize nuclear, but politics get in the way of using efficient designs and public perception is unfairly negative despite it being the safest of all energy production methods[1]. If electric vehicles gain more traction then the emissions from the transport of materials for nuclear etc. also stop being a factor. Side note, I hate this font they use that makes a 1 look like a seriffed I. Unnecessarily hard to read. 1: https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

maltalex 8y ago
The problem with energy efficiency is that it paradoxically tends to increase consumption. There’s a basic economic aspect we mustn’t forget - supply and demand. When energy prices drop, consumers often buy more if it. I’m on mobile so I don’t have a link at hand, but I recall reading that people drove a lot less when gas prices were higher. When they went back down, people went back to driving more. If you really want to lower energy consumption- just raise the price.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  Lowering energy consumption isn't the end goal, lowering harmful emissions is. If in the future, energy is produced entirely by solar, hydro, and nuclear, vehicles/machinery use little or no fossil fuels, and air conditioners have continued to be improved wrt use of coolant/leakage, then there's no need to reduce consumption because consumption is harmless. In the meantime, pricing poor people out of electric is not a good solution.
  - njarboe 8y ago
    At some point waste heat itself will warm the planet enough to matter. With exponential growth one can get there pretty quickly. A few hundred years. At some point we should add a heat tax to compliment the carbon tax (that we should already have in place).

chosenbreed 8y ago

Interesting...there a few comments putting forward the case for energy expenditure to provide heating and cooling. Can't really argue with any of them. However, I wonder how much of the need is driven by the modern lifestyles we have now. I appreciate that the planet is getting warmer (and that perhaps we're seeing more severe winters) but how did people get by 100 years ago? Or a 1000 years ago? How did people survive the heat? How did they survive the cold? We can't turn back the clock but perhaps there's something to gain by looking at the past...

chrisseaton 8y ago
> How did people survive the heat? How did they survive the cold? Well they often didn’t. People still die from cold winters and hot summers, especially old people. Air conditioning and heating is not a luxury for some of these people.
- dcx 8y ago
  This. I'm from a tropical country. My grandmother told me stories about plantation work back in the day - people used to literally drop dead from the heat all the time.
venantius 8y ago
Well, in the past we (a) died younger and (b) burned a lot of things for heat. I'd argue that literally nobody wants to go back to (a), and if every household in the world was still burnings a stove to stay warm we'd have an even worse global warming situation than we currently have.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  > and if every household in the world was still burnings a stove to stay warm we'd have an even worse global warming situation than we currently have. Speaking of burning things in stoves, this reminds me of a way to get people to burn all sorts of nasty things in wood stoves: Tax the crap out of electrical energy and/or fossil fuels. Make people pay a lot to dispose of their trash. It's good to remember that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

dragonwriter 8y ago

We probably don't need to do much of anything about air conditioning specifically, we just need to price in the externalities of energy use generally. But it might make sense to incentivize (whether through positive incentives or negative incentives on traditional AC, or both) use of geothermal heat pumps instead of air-source heat pumps, since the latter is, pretty much by definition, least efficient when most needed—long-term, they are already a net win for the consumer as well as the environment, but the payoff time is long enough and traditional AC culturally-established enough that it doesn't even tend to be considered as an option enough.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
It is probably cheaper, and more fungible, to incentivize clean renewables generation for AC use than expensive ground loops for geothermal/in-ground heat pumps. Clean energy can be used for anything, but sunk copper or plastic piping in the ground on a property is fairly constrained in what it can be used for.
3pt14159 8y ago
In Toronto we have this huge system of underground cooling that transfers cool from the lake. It's great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_water_source_cooling#First_system_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_water_source_cooling#Firs...
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Double great because it only cools using water that the city was planning on using anyway. If they heated the water up and sent it back into Lake Ontario, the temperature differential would have a drastic impact on the wildlife in the area.
- gtdawg 8y ago
  Pretty cool! One thing to note is the cooling capacity is limited to the consumption rate of the city based on how it's designed right now. > The cold water drawn from Lake Ontario's deep layer in the Enwave system is not returned directly to the lake once it has been run through the heat exchange system. The Enwave system only uses water that is destined to meet the city's domestic water needs. Therefore, the Enwave system does not pollute the lake with a plume of waste heat.

RobertSmith 8y ago

We are cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable.

kasey_junk 8y ago
And to heat the part that isn’t.

legitster 8y ago

I am very skeptical. Air conditioning has enabled large amounts of people to move from cold climates to warm climates (places like Dallas and Hong Kong basically wouldn't exist like they do without it). And there is a lot more energy spent heating in the north than there is cooling in the south. So on average, I would assume there is a net benefit if you consider the tradeoffs. I think there is a stigma people have that heating is essential for life, but A/C is optional. But we should really compare them against each other.

ex-pralite-monk 8y ago
I grew up in central Florida in the 1960s. Our house and many of our school rooms didn't have air conditioning until the mid 1970s. It's doable: brick school rooms are a decent insulator. Jalousie windows in every house.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Shivetya 8y ago
plus there is still a lot of heating done with oil and even coal in some places. the temperature difference alone should point to heating being more expensive. (going from freezing to acceptable is a lot more energy than from hot to the same temperature). throw in the added benefit of AC is humidity control and AC is just a win win tech.
- Retric 8y ago
  Humility makes this less true than you would think. AC’s drip water because they condescend it from the air which takes lots of energy.
  - r_smart 8y ago
    I can't tell if this is a weird attempt at a pun, a funny typo, or some kind of koan.

725686 8y ago

Whenever I go to the USA, I just hate how cold (summer)/hot (winter) are the malls and other closed spaces. Why can't they set it at a reasonable temp? I'm sure that will help a bit to reduce energy waste.

izzydata 8y ago
I don't know of many malls that still exist, but I often find that most large enclosed spaces set a temperature and leave it at that 24/7 365. It is often about 70-75.

kalleboo 8y ago

> Without drastic improvements in air-conditioners’ efficiency The biggest gain in air conditioner efficiency is not in the air conditioner itself, but in the housing it is used in. In Asia, lots of housing is built cheaply with terrible insulation, so the air conditioning is burning electricity in waste to cool the great outdoors.

jay-anderson 8y ago
I heard on the radio recently that even though cities have been growing the overall water usage hasn't grown with it. The report attributed it to more efficient toilets. If cities required better insulation would we see a similar effect or are there better things to attack in general? It makes sense that moving from terrible insulation to decent insulation would be a good move. Do we know how good? Have there been estimates on the savings? How about moving from decent insulation to excellent insulation?
- soundwave106 8y ago
  From what I'm seeing, moving from terrible insulation to decent insulation is an excellent idea. Moving from decent insulation to excellent insulation... maybe not so much. There is a point of diminishing returns where more R values in your insulation does not gain you much. According to this fact sheet from the North Carolina energy office: https://files.nc.gov/ncdeq/Environmental%20Assistance%20and%20Customer%20Service/IAS%20Energy%20Efficiency/Opportunities/Insulation_Guidelines.pdf https://files.nc.gov/ncdeq/Environmental%20Assistance%20and%... "Insulation installation which brings a building up to standard can result in a savings of 1—5% of HVAC costs depending on the conditions before the improvements are implemented." However, if you combine insulation with inspecting ductwork / windows / doors / attics and plugging as many air leaks as practically possible, the estimated savings rate rises considerably. Energystar's site (https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=home_sealing.hm_improvement_methodology https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=home_sealing.hm_impro...) for instance estimates 11% of utility bill savings with a combination of methods.

pro_zac 8y ago

Not totally on topic, but the thing that shocks me as ridiculously inefficient is huge freezer aisles in grocery stores in cold climates. They heat the store and then cool the freezers. Can't they just pump in outside air? Granted this wouldn't work year round in many places, but I feel like there is a better solution.

alkonaut 8y ago
Freezers provide heat outside the freezer - which is in the store. So while not the most efficient kind of heating it’s not “heat the store and cool the freezers”. 1kWh spent cooling a fridge is 1kWh heat added to the store. (This depends on where the freezer heat exchangers are)
- pro_zac 8y ago
  That makes sense. So it is better to have freezers running in a store you are trying to heat up than one you are trying to cool. I had it completely backward.
  - julbaxter 8y ago
    No, you had it right. You need to cool the freezer because you put it in the store. The more you heat the store (and the freezer is heating the store), the more you need to cool the freezer.

lbriner 8y ago

The good thing about AC is that it generates heat as a by-product but in most cases, this is not used. Imagine if local air-con could provide all of a hospital/school/government building's hot water (and heating since they tend to roast in the UK). Perhaps there is a market for a company that links the air-con user and local large users of hot water or even factories that need heat for their work.

ryanmarsh 8y ago
Yes heat exchangers are well understood. You're mainly talking about the condenser side of an HVAC system. Cooling towers have been around a while. I imagine you'd need a hybrid approach. I doubt you'll find many buildings where the hot water needs are 1:1 with the waste heat from the HVAC system. Now you have two problems. Your hot water heater just got really complex. However, building codes could mandate that energy for heating water first come from waste heat from the HVAC system. That would drive innovation in the space and who knows maybe it would become common. It's kind of like killing a fly with a hammer though, plus existing structures would get grandfathered in. Energy generation seem to me to be the better bang for the buck. What would be really awesome is if someone invented a very efficient industrial thermoelectric generator that could be used in the condenser of an HVAC system. Think, regenerative breaking.

scarejunba 8y ago

Nobody is going to listen to people in heated homes asking other people to stop cooling their homes. It's not going to happen. According to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421508005168 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142150... cooling will exceed heating in 2060. So the real problem here are rich cold countries.

vanderZwan 8y ago

I have one "problem" with airconditioning: it's a "cure" for cooling down a building after it heats up too much, but the more cost-effective, sustainable solution is prevention. If we prioritize battling the urban heat island effect first, the remaining temperature problems can be tackled at a much lower energy cost with with airco. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island [1] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities-1-the-solar-envelope.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities... [2] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities-2-solar-access-in-19th-century-cities.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities... [3] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities-3-housing-density.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities...

Reason077 8y ago
Isn't the "urban heat island" effect a fundamental property of the way we've designed and built our cities? To fix it, wouldn't we need to redesign buildings to have things like green roofs and use construction materials that reflect heat. And we'd have to tear up much of our paving and roads and replace them with trees, water, and green space. That all sounds nice, and it's a good principle to consider when designing new urban areas. But it's extremely expensive and disruptive to go rebuilding existing cities, and all the construction itself would have an environmental cost. Surely air conditioning is cheaper?
- hinkley 8y ago
  First thing to do is stop making the problem worse. Last I checked we are still building our cities. Mine is in the process of knocking down all the one story commercial space and replacing it with six story mixed use buildings.
  - Reason077 8y ago
    Increasing density in urban areas by building up is the right thing to do, compared to expanding urban areas which would require more paving, more roads, and more inefficient use of land. It's the way we design those new buildings that's important.

kqr2 8y ago

Is geothermal hvac a more efficient option? Has it been used in large buildings? https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/great-energy-challenge/2013/10-myths-about-geothermal-heating-and-cooling/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/great-energy-...

thinkcontext 8y ago

The amount of harm from refrigerants, the chemicals used in cooling systems to move heat around, is vastly underappreciated so its good to see it mentioned. "HFCs trap between 1,000 and 9,000 times as much heat as the same amount of CO2, meaning they are much more potent causes of global warming. On this basis, Paul Hawken of Project Drawdown, a think-tank, calculates that improving air-conditioners could do more than anything else to reduce greenhouse gases."

Tharkun 8y ago
There are heat pumps which use CO2 as their refrigerant. Apparently they are more efficient (and less potentially hazardous for people and climate) than most alternatives.
- thinkcontext 8y ago
  From what I've seen it's used in water heater heat pumps, not space heating and cooling. Perhaps with tighter regulations on HFCs CO2 will be more widely used.

userbinator 8y ago

The ironic thing about the replacement of CFCs is that the replacement refrigerants have all tended to be less efficient, toxic, flammable, or a combination of all those. One has to wonder how the environmental effects of the latter compare.

j45 8y ago

Having more available productive hours per day in hot climates helps everyone get further in their lives, however they may choose. I didn't grow up with A/C, but it's definitely the one thing I don't hesitate to turn on when needed. It would help if air conditioning technology could innovate and improve immensely to attack some of the valid issues it has.

johngalt 8y ago

A/C consumes less energy than heating. A/C is effectively a closed system when operating. A fireplace or furnace is not. A/C is needed most in places and times where solar panels work the best. Heating is the opposite. Objectively living in Maine has a significantly higher environmental cost than living in Arizona.

saudioger 8y ago
Especially once you consider that in some places (New England) you have people living in both extremes. So they're using heat in the winter AND air conditioning in the summer. New England winters are on average colder than some places near the arctic circle (Iceland for example) and summers get hotter than many places in the US as well.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
  I live in New England, and the situation is definitely a little complex. Some factors where I live: - Firewood is really cheap. My house uses oil for its primary heating, but we supplement with a wood stove because aesthetics and cheap heat. - A lot of the summer it's not the heat that gets you, more the humidity. We run A/C a lot, but often we could get by with just better dehumidifiers whose waste-heat stayed outside the house. - Only relatively new houses have central A/C and/or dehumidifiers. Older houses tend to use window-mounted A/C's, which are less efficient and less appealing. Unfortunately retrofitting a house with central A/C can be outside many people's budgets. - At my latitude, we get enough sunlight to make roof-mounted solar panels worthwhile for many people. But the financial break-even time can be pretty long, and there don't always seem to be government-subsidized low-interest loans to help.
  - saudioger 8y ago
    Ah firewood is nice. I live in a dense urban area and we wouldn't really have the option. We're on an electric heat pump for heating/cooling/dehumidifying (it's a nice system, a little expensive, but better than resistance electric heat and window units). We're in an old house without ducts, and compared to traditional systems it was cheap to install ($10k for 1500 ft sq).

manishas 8y ago

Everything in life is a calculation and needs to be balanced. We need to encourage people and businesses to use their ACs only when required, but at the end of the day, we need to find better ways of saving the environment while still supporting 7B people on the planet to live reasonably comfortably.

Reedx 8y ago

Something I've long wondered about: Do restaurants, malls and movie theaters need to be that damn cold? Does it really increase sales that much? It's a major pet peeve of mine. Office buildings are often much cooler than they need to be too. I think most places, including homes, could reduce A/C significantly.

branchless 8y ago
Does anyone really care about the environment? It's in front of our eyes every day. Supermarkets have superfluous packaging. They have fridges without any doors on pumping out cold air constantly. We have advertisements sucking energy constantly. Bitcoin uses a significant chunk of the world electricity? It's "innovative"! Massive commutes to completely pointless jobs where companies compete to deliver the pointless service before employees travel 90 minutes back to their inadequately insulated home. If someone came down from space to visit us and we said we are trying to fix the environment they'd laugh. We are in this mess because our system inexorably leads to it. We've been in this mess since we adopted this system. We have to ditch it.
grasshopperpurp 8y ago
Living in Florida, we keep our AC at 78 - which is what a representative of our local energy company suggested. For two humans, and two dogs, it's comfortable. When we have company, we kick it down to 76 - or 74 if someone is cooking.
JimboOmega 8y ago
When I got my first job the excuse I heard for the office being so cold is that it is chilled for men in suits (with jackets on). Which is definitely not how most employees are dressed in the summer!
HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
Part of the problem is humidity removal. There are many times when I'll lower the thermostat even though the temperature is already at 76F, but I need to get the humidity lower in order to make the room/house comfortable. It's especially the case at night where, if the humidity were lower, I'd just turn off A/C and open the windows.

billfruit 8y ago

I am ever amazed at the usage fahrenheit in the US. Do even the weather reports state temp like in fahrenheit? Also sometimes wonder if the weather reports should be tell ing wet bulb temperatures, because it also gives an indication of humidity.

21 8y ago
> sometimes wonder if the weather reports should be tell ing wet bulb temperatures This is why many reports or apps have "feels like X degrees"
klodolph 8y ago
> I am ever amazed at the usage fahrenheit in the US. Do even the weather reports state temp like in fahrenheit? Yes, but why should this be amazing?
- kragen 8y ago
  Because it's been obsolete for half a century. The insistence of the US on using archaic systems of measurement, despite the substantial extra difficulty of calculation and attendant errors resulting in the occasional loss of space probes and the like, is a source of continuous amusement and frustration for the rest of the world.
  - jazzyjackson 8y ago
    Luckily the average American isn't doing any calculation based on the weather. We just want to know if its hella hot (100) or hella cold (0)
  - innocentfelon 8y ago
    Using similar logic, you could argue all countries need to get with the program and speak English. Or use US dollars. Or (yikes) Microsoft Windows. America’s quaint and annoying reliance on feet, inches, miles, and pounds is culturally important, even if it makes engineering a pain.

nwah1 8y ago

I'm surprised that there isn't some kind of huge multi-billion dollar prize to improve air conditioners. Environmental groups have so much money, and they waste it lobbying for bans on plastic straws. How about some R&D, please.

deleted 8y ago

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gesticulator 8y ago
Do you have examples of a low-tech gravity train? From what I know there's serious limitations to this tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_train#Objections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_train#Objections

robdachshund 8y ago

I'd say ac is a net positive when it allows for the refrigeration and freezing of food. Less food is wasted, and food can be bought in bulk which means people aren't driving to a market everyday.

yourapostasy 8y ago

Scrolled through comments up to time of writing this, and didn't see much discussion of the low-hanging fruit still available to reduce A/C-related electrical demand in the US. Commenters are bringing up insulation, but not in detail. We need the PassivHaus insulation standard with droplet-based air tightness treatment (that brings the air tightness to about twice or better than PassivHaus specifies) as the minimum required. Ideally, city-scale recycling centers would redirect used styrofoam to re-form with limonene into insulating blocks, keeping it out of landfills and oceans, and entrain into a more permanent use. Real estate industry needs go along; advertise and market that 4-8 foot thick insulation in walls are attractive for starters. 3-6 inch gap rain screen on all outside surfaces, white or light-colored reflective takes out ~5 degrees F of cooling effort with completely passive design. Overrule all HOAs and city building codes nationwide at the federal level, and anyone who wants to re-position their property improvement to take advantage of the solar path may do so without seeking permission. That is, the footprint alignment of any planned improvement (new or modification) that is aligned with a federally-published local solar path is an instant "shall-issue" permit; the actual footprint size, dimensions, permeable cover ratio, etc. still goes through normal permitting processes. Anyone who wants to build long-overhang porches that screen out all but the last X minutes of sunrise or sunset may do so without seeking permission. Overrule all local jurisdictions at the federal level, and any enclosed space that does not use A/C, that is, only has dehumidification (no active cooling) and/or ceiling fans, do not count in property taxes, or count for something like 10% of normal assessment.

phonz 8y ago

AC can use refrigerants that are not pollutants. Also AC by definition can always be solar powered. This is literally a non-issue. Here’s a question: why do we not shelter our homes and buildings? It doesn’t make any sense to let the sun bake the house and then continually refrigerate the inside of it. Just string some cloth or literally any material over the house with an air gap. It would cost almost nothing compared the the total cost of the house and it would save tons of money on cooling alone. So why isn’t it done? Well it is, but if your shade structure isn’t organic and green leafed, you get run out of town. Such a shame. We need some kind of artificial tree.

HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
What if you like the view? You can't consider these things in isolation from other factors.
- phonz 8y ago
  I don’t understand. The view would be the same. It would be the same as having as having roofs. Just slightly raised and maybe a different color. No problem with views.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
    When I read "over the house" I was thinking that this shield would go around the house. Most of the heat entering my house is through the walls and windows. There's a huge air gap and thick insulation below the roof, so that's not much of a problem.
    - phonz 8y ago
      A little overhang would solve that mostly.

forapurpose 8y ago

Some tips to minimize a/c usage with zero loss of comfort: 1. You only need you to be cool, not the entire room or building. Find solutions that cool you - including wearing cool, loose-fitting clothing. It's absurd to warm yourself up by trapping body heat and then to use an a/c unit to cool the entire room / suite / building in order to cool yourself down again. 2. Use fans; enjoy the pleasures of a gentle breeze. Convection is a powerful thing, and unless the ambient air is warmer than your body temperature, the breeze probably will cool you off. The new tower fans are especially effective and user-friendly - they aren't ugly, you don't need to attach them to anything and they don't need much clearance, and the breeze is well-attenuated. Their effect is surprisingly powerful. 3. Imagine what temperature would be comfortable for sitting outside, in the shade, with a breeze (see #2). 26-27C (~79-81F)? A little lower? A little higher? Maybe even experiment a little, and set your thermostat to that temperature. 4. Never turn on the a/c if it's cool enough outside (see #3). If you need more air exchange with the outside, get an exhaust fan. 5. Open the windows when it's cool outside, then as soon as it starts warming up - probably at sunrise - close them. (I wish there was a home automation system that would do it for me). Even on ~30C+ (86F+) days, that's been enough to keep the place cool until mid-afternoon. 6. If none of that is enough, turn on the a/c. I'll bet you won't want it nearly as often. I'd guess that we've cut our a/c usage by ~80% with zero impact on our comfort.

ekianjo 8y ago

Energy-wise, Airconditioning is quite cheap. In Japan we use "aircon" pretty much all the time in summer (it's really, really hard to live without when it's 35C+ in 90% humidity) yet the electricity bills are much more reasonable compared to what we need to pay in winter when we need to heat up the place (temporarily only).

williesleg 8y ago

What does Al Gore do?

drewmol 8y ago

In case anyone else was curious - According to various internet sources: [0]"according to a 1958 NASA report people can live indefinitely in environments that range between roughly 40 degrees F and 95 degrees F (4 and 35 degrees C), if the latter temperature occurs at no more than 50 percent relative humidity." [0]https://www.livescience.com/34131-infographic-limits-of-human-survival.html https://www.livescience.com/34131-infographic-limits-of-huma...

mirimir 8y ago

With global climate change, energy use for air conditioning will arguably increase. Given the timing, it's a good use for PV. But to the extent that CO2 emissions result, you have a positive feedback.

j1vms 8y ago

Don't tell anyone that thinks A/C comes at a high environmental cost, anything about what would be needed to make Mars viable for even a single person to stay there. They might blow a gasket. Forget about if we get to building a small village on the Red Planet.

basicplus2 8y ago

Reverse cycle arconditioners use between 3 to 5x more power than a dedicated cooling system in cooling mode or a dedicated heating system in heating mode

zanethomas 8y ago

In 1955, when I was 5 years old, my family moved to Pasadena, CA. There was no air conditioning anywhere I can recall, definitely not at home or at school. I moved to Seattle about 30 years later. I returned to Southern California a few years ago and was surprised to find that most people here think they can't live without air-conditioning.

toastermoster 8y ago

I've often wondered how feasible it would be to combine thermal storage with battery storage and solar energy production. During the winter such a system could heat water while producing excess solar power and during the summer maybe produce ice with excess solar power during. I wonder if that could be more efficient than storing chemical energy through batteries alone.

baybal2 8y ago

The story with aircon efficiency is the same as with heating in high latitudes. Building with high volume, aspect ratio and thermal insulation are more efficient, but very few high rises are made like that: luxury high rises are made for people who can bang few hundred bucks per month on heating/cooling just to have panoramic windows, and cheapest high rises are made with a single consideration of maximising kilobucks per square metre. Were building codes to enforce energy efficiency, builders of luxury high rises will scream murder. What I calculated with my level of math, it is safe to say that proper insulation, reducing glazing to 30-40% of the facade, and proper central air conditioning will drop energy use of a 40 storey high rise by 30 to 40 percents.