Section:GDN 1J PaGe:11 Edition Date:190829 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 28/8/2019 17:40 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
11
actual inhabitants, the conditions they require to live
are sourced later, in a piecemeal fashion. “You see these
immense towers go up, and they’re already locking the
need for air conditioning into the building,” says Marlyne
Sahakian, a sociologist who studies the use of air
conditioning in the Philippines.
Over coff ee recently in London, the infl uential
Malaysian architect Ken Yeang lamented what he viewed
as the loss of an entire generation of architects and builders
to a dependency on fossil fuels to control the environment.
“So much damage has been done by those buildings,”
he says, “I have entirely lost hope in my generation;
perhaps the next one can design a rescue mission.”
To its proponents, air conditioning is often presented
as a simple choice that consumers make to improve
their lives as they climb the economic ladder. “It’s no
longer a luxury product but a necessity,” an executive
at the Indian branch of the Japanese air-conditioner
manufacturing giant Daikin told the Associated Press
last year. “Everyone deserves AC.”
This refrain is as familiar in Rajasthan now as it was in
the US 70 years ago. Once air conditioning is embedded
in people’s lives, they tend to want to keep it. But that
fact obscures the ways that consumers’ choices are
shaped by forces beyond their control. In her 1967
book Vietnam, Mary McCarthy refl ected on this subtle
proscription of choice in American life. “In American
hotel rooms,” she wrote, “you can decide whether or not
to turn on the air conditioning (that is your business), but
you cannot open the window.”
One step towards solving the problem presented
by air conditioning – and one that doesn’t require a
complete overhaul of the modern city – would be to
build a better air conditioner. There is plenty of room
for improvement. The invention of air conditioning
predates both the fi rst aeroplane and the fi rst public
radio broadcast, and the underlying technology has not
changed much since 1902. “Everything is still based on
the vapour compression cycle; same as a refrigerator. It’s
eff ectively the same process as a century ago,” says Colin
Goodwin, the technical director of the Building Services
Research and Information Association. “What has
happened is we’ve expanded the aff ordability of the air
conditioner, but as far as effi ciency, they’ve improved
but they haven’t leaped.”
One scheme to encourage engineers to build a more
effi cient air conditioner was launched last year by the
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a US-based energy
policy think tank, and endorsed by the UN environment
programme and government of India. They are off ering
$3m to the winner of the inaugural Global Cooling prize.
The aim is to design an air conditioner that is fi ve times
more effi cient than the current standard model, but which
costs no more than twice as much money to produce.
They have received more than a hundred entries, from
lone inventors to prominent universities, and even
research teams from multi billion-dollar appliance giants.
But, as with other technological responses to climate
change, it is far from certain that the arrival of a more
effi cient air conditioner will signifi cantly reduce global
emissions. According to the RMI, in order to keep total
global emissions from new air conditioners from rising,
their prize-winning effi cient air conditioner would
need to go on sale no later than 2022, and capture
80% of the market by 2030. In other words, the new
product would have to almost totally replace its rivals
in less than a decade. Benjamin Sovacool, professor of
energy policy at Sussex University and a lead author on
the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) report, describes this ambition as not impossible,
but pretty unlikely.
“This idea of technology saving us is a narrative that we
want to believe. Its simplicity is comforting,” he says. It has
proven so comforting, in fact, that it is often discussed as
if it is our fi rst and best response to climate change – even
as the timeframe for inventing and implementing such
technologies becomes so narrow as to strain credulity.
New air-conditioner technology would be welcome,
but it is perhaps “the fourth, or maybe fi fth thing on
the list we should do” to reduce the emissions from air
conditioning, says Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, a professor of
climate change and energy policy at Central European
University, and a lead author on the forthcoming IPCC
report. Among the higher priorities that she mention s
are planting trees, retrofi tting old buildings with proper
ventilation, and no longer building “concrete and glass
cages that can’t withstand a heatwave”. She adds: “All
of these things would be cheaper too, in the long run.”
But while these things are technically cheaper, they
require changes in behaviour and major policy shifts – and
the open secret of the climate crisis is that nobody knows
how to make these kind of changes on the systematic,
global scale that the severity of the crisis demands.If we are not about to be rescued by technology, and
worldwide policy changes look like a distant hope,
there remains a very simple way of reducing the
environmental damage done by air conditioning: use
less of it. But, as the ecological economist and IPCC
author Julia Steinberger has written , any serious
proposals to change our lifestyles – cutting down on
driving, fl ying or imported avocados – are considered
“beyond the pale, heretic, almost insane”. This is
especially true of air conditioning, where calls to use it
less are frequently treated as suggestions that people
should die in heatwaves, or evidence of a malicious
desire to deny other people the same comforts that
citizens in wealthy countries already enjoy.
This summer, the publication of a New York Times
article asking “ Do Americans need air conditioning? ”
touched off a thousand furious social media posts,
uniting fi gures from the feminist writer and critic Roxane
Gay (“You wouldn’t last a summer week in Florida
without it. Get a grip”) to the conservative professor and
pundit Tom Nichols (“Air conditioning is why we left
the caves ... You will get my A C from me when you pry
it from my frozen, frosty hands”).
Despite this backlash, there is a reasonable case to be
made that we are over-reliant on air conditioning and
could cut back. The supposedly ideal indoor temperature
has long been determined by air-conditioning engineers,
using criteria that suggest pretty much all humans want
the same temperature range at all times. The underlying
idea is that comfort is objective, and that a building in
Jakarta should be the same temperature as one in Boston.
In practice, says Leena Thomas, this means that the
temperature in most air-conditioned buildings is usually
“low- 20s plus/minus one”.
But not everyone has accepted the notion that there
is such as thing as the objectively “right” temperature.
Studies have suggested that men have diff erent ideal
temperatures from women. In offi ces around the world,
“Men toil in their dream temperatures, while women
are left to shiver,” argued a 2015 article in the Telegraph,
one of many suggesting that scientifi c research had
confi rmed something millions of women already knew.
Researchers have also shown that people who live in
hotter areas, even for a very short time, are comfortable at
higher indoor temperatures. They contend that, whether
it is a state of mind or a biological adjustment, human
comfort is adaptive, not objective. This is something
that seems obvious to many people who live with thesetemperatures. At a recent conference on air conditioning
in London, an Indian delegate chided the crowd: “If
I can work and function at 30 C, you could too .”
Adding to the weight of evidence against the
idea of the “ideal” temperature, Frederick Rohles,
a psychologist , has conducted studies showing
that subjects who were shown a false thermometer
displaying a high temperature felt warm, even if the
room was cool. “These are the sorts of things that drive
my engineering colleagues crazy,” he wrote in 2007.
“Comfort is a state of mind!”
Ashok Lall points out that once people are open to
the idea that the temperature in a building can change,
you can build houses that use air conditioning as a last
resort, not a fi rst step. “But there is no broad culture or
regulation underpinning this,” he says. At the moment,
it is the deterministic camp that has control of the levers
of power – and their view continues to be refl ected in
building codes and standards around the world.How, then, can we get ourselves out of the air-
conditioning trap? On the continuum of habits and
technologies that we need to reduce or abandon if we
are to avoid the worst eff ects of the climate crisis, the
air conditioner falls somewhere in the middle: harder to
reduce than our habit of eating meat fi ve times a week;
easier than eliminating the fossil-fuel automobile.
According to Nick Mabey, a former senior civil
servant who runs the UK-based climate politics
consultancy E3G, air conditioning has – like many
consumer products that are deeply embedded in society
and, in aggregate, drive global warming – escaped the
notice of most governments. There is little precedent
for top-down regulation. “There is no department that
handles this, there’s no guy you can just go talk to who
controls air conditioning,” he says.
The key, Mabey says, is to fi nd the places it can be
controlled, and begin the push there. He is supporting
a UN programme that aims to improve the effi ciency –
and thus reduce the emissions – of all air conditioners
sold worldwide. It falls under the unglamorous label
of consumer standards. Currently, the average air
conditioner on the market is about half as effi cient as
the best available unit. Closing that gap even a little bit
would take a big chunk out of future emissions.
At the local level, some progress is being made. The
New York City council recently passed far-reaching
legislation requiring all large buildings in the city to
reduce their overall emissions by 40% by 2030, with a goal
of 80% by 2050, backed with hefty fi nes for off enders.
Costa Constantinides, the council member spearheading
the legislation, says it is “the largest carbon-emissions
reduction ever mandated by any city, anywhere”. The
Los Angeles mayor’s offi ce is working on similar plans,
to make all buildings net-zero carbon by 2050.
Other cities are taking even more direct action. In
the mid-1980s, Geneva, which has a warmer climate
than much of the US, the local government banned
the installation of air conditioning except by special
permission. This approach is relatively common across
Switzerland and, as a result, air conditioning accounts for
less than 2% of all electricity used. The Swiss don’t appear
to miss air conditioning too much – its absence is rarely
discussed, and they have largely learned to do without.
In countries where air conditioning is still relatively
new, an immense opportunity exists to fi nd alternatives
before it becomes a way of life. The aim, in the words
of Thomas, should be to avoid “the worst of the
west”. Recently, the Indian government adopted
recommendations by Thomas, Rawal and others into
its countrywide national residential building code
(“an immensely powerful document” says Rawal). It
allow s higher indoor temperatures based on Indian
fi eld studies – Indian levels of comfort – and not es
the “growing prevalence” of buildings that use air
conditioning as a technology of last resort.
Cutting down on air conditioning doesn’t mean
leaving modernity behind, but it does require facing up to
some of its consequences. “It’s not a matter of going back
to the past. But before, people knew how to work with
the climate,” says Ken Yeang. “Air conditioning became
a way to control it, and it was no longer a concern. No
one saw the consequences. People see them now.” •Calls to try to reduce air
con use are frequently
treated as suggestions
that people should be
left to die in heatwaves
Air conditioning
units at the back
of a building in
Hong Kong
ANDREW AITCHISON/
IN PICTURES/GETTY
IMAGES
Stephen
Buranyi
is a regular
contributor to
the Long ReadThursday 29 Aug ust 2019 The Guardian
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