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Air conditioning has saved countless human lives.[0] It is one of our greatest inventions. I'm not sure this is the intention, but the sentiment expressed in th

Air conditioning has saved countless human lives.[0] It is one of our greatest inventions. I'm not sure this is the intention, but the sentiment expressed in this article, when adopted as policy, puts human lives at risk.[1] There is no iron law that we can either have clean energy or air conditioning, but not both. And as a consequence, there is no iron law saying that environmentalism must be anti-human. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/study-home-air-conditioning-cut-premature-deaths-on-hot-days-80-percent-since-1960/2012/12/22/5b57f3ac-4abf-11e2-b709-667035ff9029_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/study... [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/06/28/1010923130/the-pacific-northwest-has-limited-a-c-making-the-heat-wave-more-dangerous https://www.npr.org/2021/06/28/1010923130/the-pacific-northw...

konschubert 4y ago
AC power usage correlates well with Solar Power output, which means that this kind of power demand is super easy to satisfy.
- lettergram 4y ago
  That was always my thoughts, storage capacity of energy is fairly expensive. Also there are much cheaper ways to cool than we do today. There are a lot of passive cooling systems. An easy one is to bury pipes a few feet (>3-4ft) under ground and run a fan to push air through the pipes. You can also put pipes under a near by creek / pond if you have one near by (I have seen this done). There’s a whole lot of passive systems. Gardens on roofs, sun rooms, underground pipes, water cooled, etc. I’m currently looking at building a house with a combination of these. The problem with all these is the increased price of construction / inability / unreasonableness to adjust old homes. I do think new buildings should take advantage of some of these. But old builds aren’t really possible to convert.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    And thermal applications (like heating and cooling) enable cheap storage: store the product, not the input energy.
  - kolinko 4y ago
    At least in my country only ~40% of population lives in single family houses. The rest lives in apartaments with no access to the solutions you mentioned. Also, if you have a single family house, you can just put up solar on the roof, and that will cover AC energy expenditure, all your other energy needs from spring until fall and then have some to give back to the grid.
  - jsjohnst 4y ago
    > An easy one is to bury pipes a few feet (>3-4ft) under ground and run a fan to push air through the pipes. You’d be better served running virtually anything else besides “air” through the pipes if efficiency is your goal.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    Best investment for me was IR reflecting film for the windows. Would HIGHLY recommend. You can also get it one-way mirrored for added privacy
    - bluefirebrand 4y ago
      The main problem with reflecting heat is that it still winds up somewhere. This can cause temperature immediately outside your window to be higher. Or even reflect it into your neighbours houses. I still have this on my windows too though. It does make a big difference. It's just worth realizing the heat still goes somewhere.
      - _aavaa_ 4y ago
        I can see a concern about neighbours, but a concern about the outside doesn't make much sense to me. If the house wasn't there all of that heat would be going outside anyway.
- xfitm3 4y ago
  Solar is a luxury, it requires a substantial amount of real estate and a clear view of the sky. Both of which are incompatible with dense urban areas and shared spaces.
  - kolinko 4y ago
    You don't need any real estate aside from your own roof access. That covers 40% of population in my home country (Poland). Also, the financing is so easy that you don't need access to much capital even - if you live in a single family house and you can afford electricity then you can afford solar.
cpursley 4y ago
I think there's actually a lot of people who are okay with pushing people into mass starvation and poverty in order to achieve their xyz goals, as long as those people are not them and theirs. Most who think this way will never openly admit it (and that's assuming they actually recognize what their policies will result in). You can see this with the current energy crisis and brewing food crisis (I've seen journalists and others welcome the increase in prices as they believe it will help achieve climate goals).
- newsclues 4y ago
  It’s not a lot of people but they seem to be those in control.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  > I think there's actually a lot of people who are okay with > pushing people into mass starvation Record number of people worldwide are moving toward starvation, U.N. warns July 7, 20222:15 AM ET https://www.npr.org/2022/07/07/1110219180/record-number-of-people-worldwide-are-moving-toward-starvation-u-n-warns https://www.npr.org/2022/07/07/1110219180/record-number-of-p... > and poverty Inflation pushed 71 million people into poverty since war in Ukraine began Economy Jul 7, 2022 2:24 PM EDT https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/inflation-pushed-71-million-people-into-poverty-since-war-in-ukraine-began https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/inflation-pushed-71-mil... Both of these issues...were they brought to you by people who want to stop climate change? Or were they brought to you by the people who do not care about climate change? Starvation and poverty are being created by the same systems and short sighted thinking that are bringing on climate change. It is a truth that the human population should have never become this large. And how did that happen? With technology and capitalism.
  - Karellen 4y ago
    > It is a truth that the human population should have never become this large. [citation needed]
    - 4y ago
rayiner 4y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mistrial9 4y ago
  commentor makes a single-leap from "air conditioning problems" to the genocidal label "anti-humanists" .. casually referred to as "unhinged thinking".. in other words, within one sentence, link something that reasonable people could disagree on (air-conditioning) to some extreme, repulsive and dangerous label of a trait and include all dissenters. YNews can do better than this.
- eevilspock 4y ago
  If it weren't for your second paragraph I'd have assumed you were being sarcastic. :/
  - rayiner 4y ago
    - eevilspock 4y ago
      See my other reply. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119221 Agreed that there is often an elitist liberal holier than thou dynamic at work. But that doesn't make the issue a non-issue. If you want to sink a knife into liberal virtue signaling and hypocrisy, I will twist that knife. But let's please not conflate things. I also find your "anti-humanist" label completely unfair and prejudiced by your ideas of what is better for humanity.
      - rayiner 4y ago
        I don’t disagree we can turn up the thermostat. At my house, we are at 73-74 on the summer. And we bought slightly undersized heat pumps which operate continuously (and more efficiently) on a typical day but are insufficient on the hottest 10-20 days of the year. This is so my kids will know at least a little bit of adversity, more than for environmental reasons, but still. But messaging has a way of being simplified, and “anti-AC” is really the wrong tack.
throw0101a 4y ago
> Air conditioning has saved countless human lives.[0] Not necessarily wrong, but it may have also encouraged more people 'than necessary' to live where they "shouldn't". It brings to mind the "Phoenix (Arizona) scene" from the show King of the Hill: > [looks at car-reported temperature] Bobby: 111F? Phoenix can't really be that hot, can it? > Bobby: Oh my God, it's like standing on the sun! > Peggy: This city should not exist. It is a monument to man's arrogance. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE
- balfirevic 4y ago
  Isn't that better than living in colder areas, as heating usually takes more energy (and solar energy is more plentiful in hot/sunny periods)?
  - porknubbins 4y ago
    I think you’re basically right but there is a distinction in living somewhere hot and building cities in the desert in the American west which require redirecting or fighting over limited water resources.
    - balfirevic 4y ago
      Yeah, good point about water.
- jinto36 4y ago
  I'm in the northeast US and grew up without A/C. My house now has central A/C, but I still think of it as unnecessarily opulent and I feel bad about using it. I keep the setpoint pretty high most of the time, unless someone else comes over to visit and complains. The number of people who just leave their A/C at 70 F and leave it is just staggering to me.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    I live in Florida and AC and if I leave the AC off or too high, I'm sweating in my own home. I'd ofc be thrilled to find an alternative cooling method that works quickly and well in humid climates, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to exist yet (dry heat people apparently have other options tho)
briantakita 4y ago
Reductionist central planning thinking keeps on making the same errors over & over again. The fallacy is to blame a single culprit for a large set of problems & then create long standing institutions in the mainline of capital flow to manage the "war against" that single culprit. Of course the problems always gets worse because the survival of the long standing institutions managing the "war against" need the problems to continue growth of budgets & perceived reasons for existence.
acheron 4y ago
This whole thread is a great example of “Environmentalists Make Good Movie Villains Because They Want To Make Your Real Life Worse” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/03/environmentalists-make-good-movie-villains-because-they-want-make-your-real-life-worse/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/03/environme...
xfitm3 4y ago
I'm having a harder and harder time dealing with the extreme activism of today. It's really disappointing. While I enjoy the intellectual stimulation HN has to offer the tone and malice of activism, for any cause, has made this place toxic for me. The gain is knowledge is not worth witnessing the degradation of humanity.
- jsjohnst 4y ago
  > While I enjoy the intellectual stimulation HN has to offer the tone and malice of activism, for any cause, has made this place toxic for me. The gain is knowledge is not worth witnessing the degradation of humanity. Ironically, it’s posts like yours that I find toxic.
  - dijonman2 4y ago
    What is toxic about that opinion?
eevilspock 4y ago
This is a strawman argument. Air conditioning doesn't need to be used at the current levels it is being used to save exactly the same number of lives. So many people and businesses set the thermostat to the 60s. Even a setting in the 70s is totally unnecessary. Few people, if any, will die if the temperature is in the 80s or even 90s, and people could be honest about making such circumstantial choices. If the first world population used air conditioning less, it would allow poor people, the third world, who tend to live in environments that are hotter and more subject to costs of climate change, to use air conditioning more without adding more to humanity's carbon footprint. We as humans are quite greedy. We can live perfectly happy and comfortable lives with less plastic, less driving, less waste, but we have become addicted to all this consumption, all this convenience, and the ever greater convenience of consumption (couch shopping and to-your-door delivery, same day or hour even). We have tied our happiness to it. We have no qualms about being a small fraction of the Earth's population yet consuming and hoarding an extremely disproportionate amount of its resources, usually at the expense of poorer people, apparently because a meritocracy is at work. The modern world's values are ever more driven by "me, me, me!" and less by "us".
- baryphonic 4y ago
  > If the first world population used air conditioning less, it would allow poor people, the third world, who tend to live in environments that are hotter and more subject to costs of climate change, to use air conditioning more without adding more to humanity's carbon footprint. This is not the only way. We could also produce cleaner energy in the first world by e.g. building nuclear, solar and (probably off-shore) wind. Then those of us in the first world and the poor of the third world could have the life-saving AC technology, and maybe make the third world a bit richer in the process.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I dont see what sentiment you are referring to in the article. I have seen lots of people try to pull the ladder up on developing nations, so was expecting that in the article based on your comment. But instead found this: > These cities are characterised by badly insulated buildings and energy-wasteful transport systems: these two inefficiencies consume far more fossil fuels than AC systems. The article kind of rambled, but I agree with where it ends up, we should have always been pushing for more efficient A/C and heating (and in some places we were, proving it was possible and indeed irresponsible not to) and it is systems, not individual technologies, we should be fixing e.g. carbon taxes don't affect renewable powered AC (though we need to be careful about the refridgerents used).
- baryphonic 4y ago
  The sentiment I was referring to is twofold: first, that A/C necessarily expends fossil fuels; second, that regulation (which, incidentally, indeed almost always does "pull the ladder up" for third-world nations) is the only way to reduce fossil fuel consumption. And because the article is rambling, supporters of various remedies from AC unit regulation to thermostat regulation[0] (where regulators centrally control temperatures "only in emergencies") to even outright quotas or bans can each cite this article as justification. The unintended consequences of these are IMO anti-human. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/us/11control.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/us/11control.html

konschubert 4y ago

AC power usage correlates well with Solar Power output, which means that this kind of power demand is super easy to satisfy.

lettergram 4y ago
That was always my thoughts, storage capacity of energy is fairly expensive. Also there are much cheaper ways to cool than we do today. There are a lot of passive cooling systems. An easy one is to bury pipes a few feet (>3-4ft) under ground and run a fan to push air through the pipes. You can also put pipes under a near by creek / pond if you have one near by (I have seen this done). There’s a whole lot of passive systems. Gardens on roofs, sun rooms, underground pipes, water cooled, etc. I’m currently looking at building a house with a combination of these. The problem with all these is the increased price of construction / inability / unreasonableness to adjust old homes. I do think new buildings should take advantage of some of these. But old builds aren’t really possible to convert.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  And thermal applications (like heating and cooling) enable cheap storage: store the product, not the input energy.
- kolinko 4y ago
  At least in my country only ~40% of population lives in single family houses. The rest lives in apartaments with no access to the solutions you mentioned. Also, if you have a single family house, you can just put up solar on the roof, and that will cover AC energy expenditure, all your other energy needs from spring until fall and then have some to give back to the grid.
- jsjohnst 4y ago
  > An easy one is to bury pipes a few feet (>3-4ft) under ground and run a fan to push air through the pipes. You’d be better served running virtually anything else besides “air” through the pipes if efficiency is your goal.
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  Best investment for me was IR reflecting film for the windows. Would HIGHLY recommend. You can also get it one-way mirrored for added privacy
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    The main problem with reflecting heat is that it still winds up somewhere. This can cause temperature immediately outside your window to be higher. Or even reflect it into your neighbours houses. I still have this on my windows too though. It does make a big difference. It's just worth realizing the heat still goes somewhere.
    - _aavaa_ 4y ago
      I can see a concern about neighbours, but a concern about the outside doesn't make much sense to me. If the house wasn't there all of that heat would be going outside anyway.
xfitm3 4y ago
Solar is a luxury, it requires a substantial amount of real estate and a clear view of the sky. Both of which are incompatible with dense urban areas and shared spaces.
- kolinko 4y ago
  You don't need any real estate aside from your own roof access. That covers 40% of population in my home country (Poland). Also, the financing is so easy that you don't need access to much capital even - if you live in a single family house and you can afford electricity then you can afford solar.

cpursley 4y ago

I think there's actually a lot of people who are okay with pushing people into mass starvation and poverty in order to achieve their xyz goals, as long as those people are not them and theirs. Most who think this way will never openly admit it (and that's assuming they actually recognize what their policies will result in). You can see this with the current energy crisis and brewing food crisis (I've seen journalists and others welcome the increase in prices as they believe it will help achieve climate goals).

newsclues 4y ago
It’s not a lot of people but they seem to be those in control.
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
> I think there's actually a lot of people who are okay with > pushing people into mass starvation Record number of people worldwide are moving toward starvation, U.N. warns July 7, 20222:15 AM ET https://www.npr.org/2022/07/07/1110219180/record-number-of-people-worldwide-are-moving-toward-starvation-u-n-warns https://www.npr.org/2022/07/07/1110219180/record-number-of-p... > and poverty Inflation pushed 71 million people into poverty since war in Ukraine began Economy Jul 7, 2022 2:24 PM EDT https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/inflation-pushed-71-million-people-into-poverty-since-war-in-ukraine-began https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/inflation-pushed-71-mil... Both of these issues...were they brought to you by people who want to stop climate change? Or were they brought to you by the people who do not care about climate change? Starvation and poverty are being created by the same systems and short sighted thinking that are bringing on climate change. It is a truth that the human population should have never become this large. And how did that happen? With technology and capitalism.
- Karellen 4y ago
  > It is a truth that the human population should have never become this large. [citation needed]
  - 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago

[flagged]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mistrial9 4y ago
commentor makes a single-leap from "air conditioning problems" to the genocidal label "anti-humanists" .. casually referred to as "unhinged thinking".. in other words, within one sentence, link something that reasonable people could disagree on (air-conditioning) to some extreme, repulsive and dangerous label of a trait and include all dissenters. YNews can do better than this.
eevilspock 4y ago
If it weren't for your second paragraph I'd have assumed you were being sarcastic. :/
- rayiner 4y ago
  - eevilspock 4y ago
    See my other reply. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119221 Agreed that there is often an elitist liberal holier than thou dynamic at work. But that doesn't make the issue a non-issue. If you want to sink a knife into liberal virtue signaling and hypocrisy, I will twist that knife. But let's please not conflate things. I also find your "anti-humanist" label completely unfair and prejudiced by your ideas of what is better for humanity.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      I don’t disagree we can turn up the thermostat. At my house, we are at 73-74 on the summer. And we bought slightly undersized heat pumps which operate continuously (and more efficiently) on a typical day but are insufficient on the hottest 10-20 days of the year. This is so my kids will know at least a little bit of adversity, more than for environmental reasons, but still. But messaging has a way of being simplified, and “anti-AC” is really the wrong tack.

throw0101a 4y ago

> Air conditioning has saved countless human lives.[0] Not necessarily wrong, but it may have also encouraged more people 'than necessary' to live where they "shouldn't". It brings to mind the "Phoenix (Arizona) scene" from the show King of the Hill: > [looks at car-reported temperature] Bobby: 111F? Phoenix can't really be that hot, can it? > Bobby: Oh my God, it's like standing on the sun! > Peggy: This city should not exist. It is a monument to man's arrogance. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE

balfirevic 4y ago
Isn't that better than living in colder areas, as heating usually takes more energy (and solar energy is more plentiful in hot/sunny periods)?
- porknubbins 4y ago
  I think you’re basically right but there is a distinction in living somewhere hot and building cities in the desert in the American west which require redirecting or fighting over limited water resources.
  - balfirevic 4y ago
    Yeah, good point about water.
jinto36 4y ago
I'm in the northeast US and grew up without A/C. My house now has central A/C, but I still think of it as unnecessarily opulent and I feel bad about using it. I keep the setpoint pretty high most of the time, unless someone else comes over to visit and complains. The number of people who just leave their A/C at 70 F and leave it is just staggering to me.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  I live in Florida and AC and if I leave the AC off or too high, I'm sweating in my own home. I'd ofc be thrilled to find an alternative cooling method that works quickly and well in humid climates, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to exist yet (dry heat people apparently have other options tho)

briantakita 4y ago

Reductionist central planning thinking keeps on making the same errors over & over again. The fallacy is to blame a single culprit for a large set of problems & then create long standing institutions in the mainline of capital flow to manage the "war against" that single culprit. Of course the problems always gets worse because the survival of the long standing institutions managing the "war against" need the problems to continue growth of budgets & perceived reasons for existence.

acheron 4y ago

This whole thread is a great example of “Environmentalists Make Good Movie Villains Because They Want To Make Your Real Life Worse” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/03/environmentalists-make-good-movie-villains-because-they-want-make-your-real-life-worse/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/03/environme...

xfitm3 4y ago

I'm having a harder and harder time dealing with the extreme activism of today. It's really disappointing. While I enjoy the intellectual stimulation HN has to offer the tone and malice of activism, for any cause, has made this place toxic for me. The gain is knowledge is not worth witnessing the degradation of humanity.

jsjohnst 4y ago
> While I enjoy the intellectual stimulation HN has to offer the tone and malice of activism, for any cause, has made this place toxic for me. The gain is knowledge is not worth witnessing the degradation of humanity. Ironically, it’s posts like yours that I find toxic.
- dijonman2 4y ago
  What is toxic about that opinion?

eevilspock 4y ago

This is a strawman argument. Air conditioning doesn't need to be used at the current levels it is being used to save exactly the same number of lives. So many people and businesses set the thermostat to the 60s. Even a setting in the 70s is totally unnecessary. Few people, if any, will die if the temperature is in the 80s or even 90s, and people could be honest about making such circumstantial choices. If the first world population used air conditioning less, it would allow poor people, the third world, who tend to live in environments that are hotter and more subject to costs of climate change, to use air conditioning more without adding more to humanity's carbon footprint. We as humans are quite greedy. We can live perfectly happy and comfortable lives with less plastic, less driving, less waste, but we have become addicted to all this consumption, all this convenience, and the ever greater convenience of consumption (couch shopping and to-your-door delivery, same day or hour even). We have tied our happiness to it. We have no qualms about being a small fraction of the Earth's population yet consuming and hoarding an extremely disproportionate amount of its resources, usually at the expense of poorer people, apparently because a meritocracy is at work. The modern world's values are ever more driven by "me, me, me!" and less by "us".

baryphonic 4y ago
> If the first world population used air conditioning less, it would allow poor people, the third world, who tend to live in environments that are hotter and more subject to costs of climate change, to use air conditioning more without adding more to humanity's carbon footprint. This is not the only way. We could also produce cleaner energy in the first world by e.g. building nuclear, solar and (probably off-shore) wind. Then those of us in the first world and the poor of the third world could have the life-saving AC technology, and maybe make the third world a bit richer in the process.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I dont see what sentiment you are referring to in the article. I have seen lots of people try to pull the ladder up on developing nations, so was expecting that in the article based on your comment. But instead found this: > These cities are characterised by badly insulated buildings and energy-wasteful transport systems: these two inefficiencies consume far more fossil fuels than AC systems. The article kind of rambled, but I agree with where it ends up, we should have always been pushing for more efficient A/C and heating (and in some places we were, proving it was possible and indeed irresponsible not to) and it is systems, not individual technologies, we should be fixing e.g. carbon taxes don't affect renewable powered AC (though we need to be careful about the refridgerents used).

baryphonic 4y ago
The sentiment I was referring to is twofold: first, that A/C necessarily expends fossil fuels; second, that regulation (which, incidentally, indeed almost always does "pull the ladder up" for third-world nations) is the only way to reduce fossil fuel consumption. And because the article is rambling, supporters of various remedies from AC unit regulation to thermostat regulation[0] (where regulators centrally control temperatures "only in emergencies") to even outright quotas or bans can each cite this article as justification. The unintended consequences of these are IMO anti-human. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/us/11control.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/us/11control.html