Although the most torrid temperatures of the season seem to have left the East Coast, the heat and humidity has established a new summer tradition. As soon as temperatures rise, the hand appears on the thermostat, and rather than write upon the wall, it wags its finger and warns of the dangers of man-made cooling. Not only will people endanger the physical world around them by carelessly expending energy for comfort, but our very character will be made soft by luxury. In contrast to humanity’s stoic ancestors, who endured the heat, we now apparently disappoint them with our desire to cool everything.
In the arguments for bearing the heat, the anti-A/C activists share a common thread: those writers portray air conditioning as an unreasonable indulgence of Southerners. Our apparently selfish use of air conditioning manages to ruin the environment and even social character. Their climate argument should sound familiar: the energy required to power air conditioners often comes from fossil fuels. By this line of argument, the critics of air conditioning might note the irony of staying cool with a method that makes the planet warmer.
Why, then, is cooling so detrimental, while heating for buildings receives none of this approbation? Should Southerners (and even Northern city-dwellers on a hot summer day) swelter in their homes for the seemingly noble cause of climate change, while in the winter the Northerner can keep his home nice and toasty? A previous defender of chilled air notes that heating in fact requires more energy than air conditioning. Now it is true that New England and the upper Midwest face bitterly cold temperatures that deviate far more from habitability than do even the hottest Southern summers. Clearly, people managed to live in warm regions without air conditioning, but does that mean that we should not go without an apparent luxury?
In fact, the quality of life without air conditioning suffers dramatically, not simply because of personal discomfort but because of the general lack of development. For those West Coast students at Harvard who find Boston humid, imagine the torrid conditions of the Deep South in August. Boston suffered an official “heat wave” earlier in July, defined as three consecutive days with temperatures over 90 degrees. By this definition, the Sun Belt exists in a “heat wave” all summer long. The stereotypes of the laid-back, rural South arise as much from the imposition of climate as from cultural choice. A South Florida professor once extolled the role of air conditioning in attracting internal migration and the establishment of advanced manufacturing in the South. The most extreme opponents of chilled air readily accept this exact fact as a reason to detest air conditioning. Stan Cox, outspoken opponent of A/C, points out that air conditioning might have built the Republican Party by expanding the population of conservative Southern states. Unsurprisingly, this has especially vexed a number of people already inclined to dislike air conditioning. Yet even liberals would concede the unpleasant alternative: a miasmic, unhealthy South bereft of economic development.
The same lessons prove true around the world. One author has praised the president of Vanuatu for his ascetic rejection of air conditioning; however, with all respect to Vanuatu, the example of Singapore seems more compelling. The founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, identified air conditioning as one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century; it is hard to imagine Singapore’s gleaming office towers without relief from the natural heat. Even if the air conditioning ascetics take hold in the United States, developing countries in the tropical and subtropical zones will ramp up their cooling to advance economically. Air conditioning, then, is not merely a luxury for lazy Americans, but a critical tool for economic development.
With that said, I can understand to some extent the cultural quibbles that some have with air conditioning. Of course, offices and factories understandably need to be kept cool, but everyone has experienced the odd feeling of being cold in the summertime because of excessive air conditioning. While working in Southern offices in a sultry August, I have seen workers keep space heaters to beat the artificial chill. Likewise, there is a bit of the stubborn Southerner in me—perhaps the latent memories from my ancestors’ growing up with nothing but a fan for relief. To that extent, I can almost sympathize with the claim that excessive air conditioning makes us soft. My summer roommates can certainly attest to my sparing use of air conditioning. However, the impact of air conditioning on world development takes precedent. As much as anyone would like to take the summer off, the air conditioner is here to stay, and there’s no reason for society to cede its productivity to summertime.
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