Section:GDN 1J PaGe:10 Edition Date:190829 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 28/8/2019 17:40 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
- The Guardian Thursday 29 Aug ust 2019
10
lead to more air conditioning; more air
conditioning leads to warmer temperatures.
The problem posed by air conditioning
resembles, in miniature, the problem we face in tackling
the climate crisis. The solutions that we reach for most
easily only bind us closer to the original problem.
The global dominance of air conditioning was not
inevitable. As recently as 1990, there were only about
400m air conditioning units in the world, mostly in the
US. Originally built for industrial use, air conditioning
eventually came to be seen as essential, a symbol of
modernity and comfort. Then air conditioning went
global. Today, as with other drivers of the climate
crisis, we race to fi nd solutions – and puzzle over how
we ended up so closely tied to a technology that turns
out to be drowning us.Like the aqueduct or the automobile , air conditioning
is a technology that transformed the world. Lee Kuan
Yew , the fi rst prime minister of independent Singapore,
called it “one of the signal inventions of history” that
allowed the rapid modernisation of his tropical country.
In 1998, the American academic Richard Nathan told
the New York Times that, along with the “civil rights
revolution”, air conditioning had been the biggest
factor in changing American demography and politics
over the previous three decades, enabling extensive
residential development in the very hot, and very
conservative, American south.
A century ago, few would have predicted this. For
the fi rst 50 years of its existence, air conditioning was
mainly restricted to factories and a handful of public
spaces. The initial invention is credited to Willis Carrier,
an American engineer at a heating and ventilation
company, who was tasked in 1902 with reducing
humidity in a Brooklyn printing factory. Today we
assume that the purpose of air conditioning is to reduce
heat, but engineers at the time weren’t solely concerned
with temperature. They wanted to create the most
stable possible conditions for industrial production –
and in a print factory, humidity curled sheets of paper
and smudged ink.
Carrier realised that removing heat from the factory air
would reduce humidity, and so he borrowed technology
from the nascent refrigeration industry to create what
was, and still is, essentially a jacked-up fridge. Then as
now, air conditioning units work by breathing in warm
air, passing it across a cold surface, and exhaling cool,
dry air. The invention was an immediate success with
industry – textile, ammunition, and pharmaceutical
factories were among the fi rst adopters – and then began
to catch on elsewhere. The House of Representatives
installed air conditioning in 1928, followed by the White
House and the Senate in 1929. But during this period,
most Americans encountered air conditioning only in
places such as theatres or department stores, where it
was seen as a delightful novelty.
It wasn’t until the late 1940s, when it began to
enter people’s homes, that the air conditioner really
conquered the US. Before then, according to the
historian Gail Cooper, the industry had struggled to
convince the public that air conditioning was a necessity,
rather than a luxury. In her defi nitive account of the
early days of the industry, Air-Conditioning America,
Cooper notes that magazines described air conditioning
as a fl op with consumers. Fortune called it “a prime
public disappointment of the 1930s”. By 1938 only
one out of every 400 American homes had an air
conditioner; today it is closer to nine out of 10.
What fuelled the rise of the air conditioning was
not a sudden explosion in consumer demand, but the
infl uence of the industries behind the great postwar
housing boom. Between 1946 and 1965, 31m new
homes were constructed in the US, and for the people
building those houses, air conditioning was a godsend.
Architects and construction companies no longer had
to worry much about diff erences in climate – they
could sell the same style of home just as easily in New
Mexico as in Delaware. The prevailing mentality was
that just about any problems caused by hot climates,
cheap building materials, shoddy design or poor city
planning could be overcome, as the American Institute
of Architects wrote in 1973, “by the brute application ofmore air conditioning”. As Cooper writes, “Architects,
builders and bankers accepted air conditioning fi rst,
and consumers were faced with a fait accompli that
they merely had to ratify.”
Equally essential to the rise of the air conditioner were
electric utilities – the companies that operate power
plants and sell electricity to consumers. Electric utilities
benefi t from every new house hooked up to their grid,
but throughout the early 20th century they were also
looking for ways to get these new customers to use even
more electricity in their homes. This process was known
as “load building”, after the industry term ( load ) for the
amount of electricity used at any one time. “The cost of
electricity was low, which was fi ne by the utilities. They
simply increased demand, and encouraged customers
to use more electricity so they could keep expanding
and building new power plants,” says Richard H irsh,
a historian of technology at Virginia Tech.
The utilities quickly recognised that air conditioning
was a serious load builder. As early as 1935,
Commonwealth Edison, the precursor to the modern
Con Edison, noted in its end-of-year report that the
power demand from air conditioners was growing at 50%
a year, and “off ered substantial potential for the future”.
That same year, Electric Light & Power, an industry trade
magazine, reported that utilities in big cities “are now
pushing air conditioning. For their own good, all power
companies should be very active in this fi eld.”
By the 1950s, that future had arrived. Electric
utilities ran print, radio and fi lm adverts promoting air
conditioning, as well as off ering fi nancing and discount
rates to construction companies that installed it. In 1957,
Commonwealth Edison reported that for the fi rst time,
peak electricity usage had occurred not in the winter,
when households were turning up their heating, but
during summer, when people were turning on their air-
conditioning units. By 1970, 35% of American houses had
air conditioning, more than 200 times the number just
three decades earlier.
At the same time, air-conditioning-hungry
commercial buildings were springing up across the US.
The all-glass skyscraper, a building style that, because
of its poor refl ective properties and lack of ventilation,
often requires more than half its electricity output be
reserved for air conditioning, became an American
mainstay. Between 1950 and 1970 the average electricity
used per square foot in commercial buildings more than
doubled. New York’s World Trade Center, completed in
1974, had what was then the world’s largest AC unit, with
nine enormous engines and more than 270km of piping
for cooling and heating. Commentators at the time notedthat it used the same amount of electricity each day as
the nearby city of Schenectady, population 80,000.
The air-conditioning industry, construction companies
and electric utilities were all riding the great wave of
post war American capitalism. In their pursuit of profi t,
they ensured that the air conditioner became an essential
element of American life. “Our children are raised in an air-
conditioned culture,” an AC company executive told Time
magazine in 1968. “You can’t really expect them to live in
a home that isn’t air conditioned.” Over time, the public
found they liked air conditioning, and its use continued to
climb, reaching 87% of US households by 2009.
The postwar building spree was underpinned by the
idea that all of these new buildings would consume
incredible amounts of power, and that this would not
present any serious problems in the future. In 1992, the
journal Energy and Buildings published an article by the
British conservative academic Gwyn Prins , arguing that
the American addiction to air conditioning was a symbol
of its profound decadence. Prins summarised America’s
guiding credo as: “We shall be cool, our plates shall
overfl ow and gas shall be $1 a gallon, Amen.”During the time that air conditioning was reshaping
America’s cities, it had little eff ect elsewhere. (With
some exceptions – Japan, Australia and Singapore were
early adopters.) Now, however, air conditioning is fi nally
sweeping across the rest of the world. If the march of air
conditioning across the US tracked its post war building
and consumption boom, its more recent expansion has
follow ed the course of globalisation. As the rest of the
world adopts more Americanised ways of building and
living, air conditioning follows.
In the 1990s, many countries across Asia opened up to
foreign investment and embarked on an unprecedented
urban building spree. Over the past three decades,
about 200 million people in India have moved to cities;
in China, the number is more than 500 million. From
New Delhi to Shanghai, heavily air-conditioned offi ce
buildings, hotels and malls began to spring up. These
buildings were not only indistinguishable from those
in New York or London, but were often constructed by
the same builders and architects. “When you had this
money coming in from the rest of the world for high-end
buildings, it often came with an American or European
designer or consultancy attached,” says Ashok Lall, an
Indian architect who focuses on housing and low-energy
design. “And so it comes as a package with AC. They
thought that meant progress.”
As the rate and scale of building intensifi ed, traditional
architectural methods for mitigating hot temperatures
were jettisoned. Leena Thomas, an Indian professor of
architecture at the University of Technology in Sydney,
told me that in Delhi in the early 1990s older forms of
building design – which had dealt with heat through
window screens, or facades and brise-soleils – were
slowly displaced by American or European styles. “I
would say that this international style has a lot to answer
for,” she said. Just like the US in the 20th century, but on
an even greater scale, homes and offi ces were increasingly
being built in such a way that made air conditioning
indispensable. “Developers were building without
thinking,” says Rajan Rawal, a professor of architecture
and city planning at Cept University in Ahmedabad. “The
speed of construction that was required created pressure.
So they simply built and relied on technology to fi x it later.”
Lall says that even with aff ordable housing it is possible
to reduce the need for air conditioning by designing
carefully. “You balance the sizes of opening, the area of the
wall, the thermal properties, and shading, the orientation,”
he says. But he argues that, in general, developers are not
interested. “Even little things like adequate shading and
insulation in the rooftop are resisted. The builders don’t
appear to see any value in this. They want 10- to 20-storey
blocks close to one another. That’s just how business
works now, that’s what the cities are forcing us to do.
It’s all driven by speculation and land value.”
This reliance on air conditioning is a symptom of what
the Chinese art critic Hou Hanru has called the epoch
of post-planning. Today, planning as we traditionally
think of it – centralised, methodical, preceding
development – is vanishingly rare. Markets dictate and
allocate development at incredible speed, and for theWith air con, builders
could sell the same
style of house as
easily in New Mexico
as in Delaware
Willis Carrier
demonstrates air
conditioning at
the 1904 St Louis
World’s Fair
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