The Ecological Cost of Air Conditioning

[music[

Rebecca Ibarra: You're listening to the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC I'm Rebecca Ibarra filling in for Brian who is off today, hopefully taking a nap or drinking a pina colada. On June 30th, four days into a sweltering heat wave. New York City residents got an urgent cell phone notification. The alert said to, "avoid the use of energy intensive appliances such as washers dryers and microwaves" and to, "limit unnecessary use of air conditioning." It worked the hours following the notification showed power usage dipping citywide.

As temperatures neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit that day, AC was the only thing preventing New Yorkers from severe discomfort. Some were angered that the City should suggest cutting back on ACs in homes, especially when some public spaces like times square were still running energy consuming digital billboards. Joining us now to talk about air conditioning's rise to prominence in American households, and how studying our attitude towards refrigerants can help us understand climate change. Is Eric Dean Wilson, Queens College writing instructor and the author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. Welcome to WNYC Eric.

Eric Dean Wilson: Hi Rebecca. Thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca Ibarra: Thank you for being here. In your book's introduction, you write, "The ongoing climate emergency is impossible to comprehend as a whole. A low destruction so broad and big that it resists intimacy." Why did you choose to write about temperature control which consumes a relatively small amount of fossil fuels compared to say transportation, or manufacturing which contribute to more greenhouse gases?

Eric Dean Wilson: Totally. I think it's for one thing it's something that everyone can relate to. If you live in the United States, most of us are surrounded by air conditioning all day every day. Not only are we surrounded by it, we often don't think about it at all. Except when we think about how much we love it. I grew up in Memphis Tennessee where summers were very hot, not uncommon to be in the 90s, with the 100% humidity. Grew up in air conditioning, grew up loving air conditioning. Yet I had no idea what the history of mechanical cooling was, its impact on the climate crisis, its complications for the environment, anything like that.

I thought here was a really good way to think about the totality of climate change, the sublime problem of climate change in a way that is material but is also invisible. In that way it poses a problem to think about, unlike damages from wildfires, or hurricanes it's not spectacular. I think we can learn a lot by sticking with that non spectacular materiality of air conditioning.

Rebecca Ibarra: Let's get a bit sciency. Your book mainly discusses two types of refrigerants. Can you break them down for us?

Eric Dean Wilson: Absolutely. History of cooling, the rise of cooling comes in waves. There was mechanical cooling. There was air conditioning before Freon, but the problem with those refrigerants was that they were either poisonous or toxic or sometimes both. Movie theaters in the '1920s were air conditioned, but sometimes there would be a leak and you don't want to have an ammonia leak in a movie theater, because if you've ever smelled ammonia not only is it toxic, but it's unbearable.

In the late '1920s the Frigidaire division of general motors invented what they called a miracle refrigerant. For the first time there was a refrigerant that was efficient energy wise. It was non-toxic at least directly. It was non-flammable, in fact it was used in fire extinguishers later. It was non-corrosive, and it was pretty cheap to manufacture. It seemed like a win-win for everybody.

That is until the '1970s when two scientists Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina discovered that Freon which is being released into the atmosphere and reaching the upper atmosphere. Was so non-reactive that it was reaching the stratosphere in the ozone Layer and destroying the ozone Layer. The reason why that's important is that the ozone Layer is actually the only thing that keeps us from the sun's deadliest radiation. Practically no life could be possible on earth without the ozone Layer.

Suddenly they realized, oh this chemical that we thought was totally non-toxic is actually destroying the very thing that allows life on the planet. What ensued and what the book explores is a battle between scientists, between industry the chemical manufacturers of Freon. It's probably best to call it not Freon which is a brand name but CFCs which was the first wave of refrigerants that were ozone-depleting, and between policy makers.

The good news about that is that by the early '1980s we had come to an agreement called the Montreal protocol on substances that deplete the ozone Layer. Actually the way we got to that was because the problem was so extreme that a hole was opening up in the ozone Layer in the South Pole, the famous Antarctic ozone Hole. It was opening up with a rapid force for a few months and then closing just as rapidly, no one ever thought that this was possible and it was spreading.

Although that was terrible it was so terrible that it actually galvanized policymakers, international lawmakers to come together and to put in place the Montreal Protocol. Which was the world's first and only international regulation to prevent environmental disaster with legally binding emissions goals. The Paris Climate agreement does not have legally binding emissions goals. There's a lot of hope in that. We've done it once we can do it again.

That was the first wave of refrigerants. What came in place from there or something called HFCs. Now HFCs were only meant to be temporary. They don't really deplete the ozone layer, but they are terrible global warming gases, terrible. Which means that they absorb a lot of infrared radiation and they trap heat. They're so terrible that it's estimated that by focusing on destroying responsibly and preventing the production of HFCs in the next 100 years, we can actually prevent 0.5 degrees Celsius of warming. Which doesn't sound like a lot. If you consider that the Paris climate agreement hopes to limit warming by under 1.5 degrees that's actually a third of the way to the Paris climate agreement.

Just by focusing on HFC refrigerants which the United States, Biden has just signaled that we're trying to phase these down. That we can actually go a third of the way towards meeting those goals, but HFCs are still in every car refrigerant, every car air conditioning unit, and most air conditioning units that we have today.

Rebecca Ibarra: Listeners, I'm wondering if any of you are taking measures to mitigate your households reliance on refrigerants? If so give us a call and share your tips with us now or maybe you have some questions for our guest Eric Dean Wilson, author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. Tweet @BrianLehrer, or you can give us a call at 646-435-7280, that's 646-435-7280, our lines are open.

Just a very quick you know unscientific recap. We had CFCs which were at the beginning and those were bad. Now we have HFCs which are still bad but are in use today. In addition to the detrimental effects of the HFCs in use today, you write that there are still plenty of older CFCs being used in the US. Your book opens on a scene of you riding along on a black market CFC deal. This was for Freon a trade name for CFC. Can you talk about that experience a bit and explain why this black market exists?

Eric Dean Wilson: Absolutely. It's illegal to produce CFCs in the United States, but it's not illegal to buy and sell them on the secondary market. It's not so much a black market as it is a secondary market. It seems very strange if we have these alternatives, some of which are cheaper, why would people buy and sell them on the secondary market. I had a friend whose job it was at the time to drive around the United States and find and buy up CFCs from people, often auto mechanics or people who had stockpiled them after they had banned them.

Why they had stockpiled them is still a little bit of a mystery to me. There's different reasons. Some people out of nostalgia, some people don't know what else to do with them because a lot of dumps won't take them. Some people claim that they work better, which they might, but you have to consider for whom does it work better. Not for all of us for sure. You can also make a lot of money off of selling them and destroying them for carbon credits through California's cap and trade system. Which is problematic in that it allows regulated industries in California to continue polluting, but for a chemical like CFC12 for instance, that's not produced anymore, it actually does some great work of getting rid of the material, because nobody else is producing it. In that respect, cap and trade can actually work to lower the amount of Freon.

What was interesting to me was first of all, this is a bizarre way to make a living I thought. His name was Sam, I had to see what Sam was seeing. He is someone who has very staunch progressive politics. As a environmentalist, we talk a lot about leftist politics, and how to address the climate crisis. He was trying to reconcile business with the climate crisis, but he was talking to these people and buying refrigerant from these people who are often global warming deniers. Very conservative, very wary of the government, and if some of them found out that he was what they called a carbon guy, they refused to sell it to him. Because they didn't want him to to destroy it.

In a funny way, their idea was one of conservation. They thought that it was wasteful to destroy this otherwise useful material. Of course, not taking into account the fact that it destroys the ozone layer. What I thought was interesting was that in a time in which we hear over and over again, almost as a cliche, that the United States has never been more divided. Here was this person who is going around talking to people across a deep and sometimes aggressive ideological divide, and in several cases was able to talk really honestly about climate change. In some cases, persuade people that it was worth thinking about, because it's about the future.

It is about the present, but it's also about allowing the possibilities of the present to continue in the future. I felt in a topic that too much of the time talks about the apocalypse, I found that this was a little glimmer of hope moving forward. To have these uncomfortable conversations.

Rebecca Ibarra: Let's go to a caller. We have George in Brooklyn. George, thank you for calling WNYC. What's your question for Eric or TIP?

George: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I as a young person said no, I would never have an air conditioner, and I didn't for many years. As I approached my 40s it becomes impossible, especially with the incredible heat, increasing heat from climate change, to sleep, or work in the heat without air conditioning. I I think it's wrong to put it on individuals like we. I don't believe there's anything that individuals can do. I think we really need the kind of policy changes that the guest is discussing. I wonder if you can describe more systemic solutions, because I just think it just going to always get this-- It's going to keep getting more and more pressure on people to use coolants as it gets hotter.

Rebecca Ibarra: George, thank you for calling. Eric, he makes such a great point, because so much of this sometimes ends up being all about personal responsibility. I think about recycling, where it's like if you recycle your one plastic bottle you will save the world, and really it's so much about systemic changes. What could you say to George, and what systemic changes have you seen that could actually be implemented?

Eric Dean Wilson: Thank you George for that. It's such a great point, and really in the big picture, I totally agree with you. One thing that I really want to emphasize, is that sometimes we under emphasize the fact that those policy changes come because of demand from individuals. It's not like there's a separate government, this is the way it should be, but it's not like there's a separate representative government and they're not the people. Those policy changes will come when you have enough people demanding aggressively that things should change.

Air conditioning unlike recycling, is something that people, even when you bring up the topic, don't even want to consider or think about differently. You bring up a great point about the increasing need for air conditioning in a hotter world, but the problem is that the vast majority of air conditioning is not for emergency situations or danger. It's for situations in which it's not needed at all. Also, there's another point to that, which is that when people get really sick or ill in a heatwave, it's not just because they don't have an air conditioner. There's a lot more complicated things that are going on.

There's a great book that studies this by Eric Klinenberg called Heatwave, that contrasts a heatwave that happened in Chicago in 1955, and then another heat wave that happened 40 years later, very comparable. More people had air conditioners in the 1995 heatwave and more people died. Not because necessarily they didn't have access to air conditioning, but because they didn't have access to the kind of infrastructure and neighborhood resilience that can prevent heat-related illness.

That brings me back to the point you were making about the structural change. I think one of the most important things is for our neighborhoods, not just the individual buildings, but the neighborhoods to be cool. How can we do that? Increasing trees and shade and access to public parks in a place like Brooklyn. I live in Brooklyn. I'm talking to you from Flatbush right now. I'm lucky to live a couple of blocks from Prospect park, the greatest park in the country I think. I swear to you, it's like 10 degrees cooler there. That is an incredible solution.

We have some great parks in the United States, but not everybody, not every neighborhood has access to them. If you go Eastern out in Brooklyn in places like Canarsie, or Old Mill Basin, or East Flatbush, you have more and more open asphalt, which absorbs heat, and you have less, and less trees. We need to invest in that kind of infrastructure. Also, every new building that is being built should incorporate passive cooling strategies. In a place like New York City, as opposed to Phoenix for instance, which is an extreme example, but in place like New York City, you very rarely need air conditioning if you have good design, if you have good fans, and so that's crucial. I really put a lot of hope into our designers.

The last thing you said, which I thought was so smart is that as it gets hotter and hotter, and you try not to use air conditioning, you can't sleep, and you can't work. One thing that I found in the history of air conditioning, is that it is always been closely related to work cultures. One thing that I think that we should be asking is, in an emergency heatwave, we are expected to work like it's a normal 9:00 to 5:00. We should treat a heatwave like we treat any other emergency: like it was a hurricane, like it was a wildfire, or something like that. To expect that we could churn out the same level of productivity is a problem.

I know that individuals don't necessarily have control of that, or have flexibility to adjust their level of productivity, but it does point to the problem. Which is that air conditioning actually sustains profit, it's always done that. From the beginning of the 20th century before cooling people, it cooled products. It was used in manufacturing to increase humidity and heat for things like cotton. To decrease humidity and heat for things like chewing gum, or movie film, also the very first people to be cooled were the stock traders at 11 Broad in Wall Street.

Rebecca Ibarra: Capitalism, Eric. Capitalism. I want to make sure we have some time to get to some more callers, so I'm going to cut and go to Maya in the Bronx, who has a question about alternatives to AC I believe. Maya, thanks for calling.

Maya: Hi, thanks for taking my call, and thank you so much for the important topic that you're speaking about. I guess my question was mainly, I feel like a lot of people just won't really stop using air conditioning unfortunately. What sort of alternatives are there if it does exist, for cooling fluid in ACs? Also if you've already touched on this, or this is a totally stupid question, I apologize, but I was thinking of that number one, and number two. If there's any sort of incentive that the government would put out should there be some alternative cooling that I assume would be more expensive in the long run.

Rebecca Ibarra: No stupid questions, and thank you so much for calling, Maya. Eric, do you have an answer for Maya for people who want to keep themselves cool?

Eric: Totally, that's a great question. I know that heat pumps are more and more of a great solution. They're air conditioners in reverse and use a lot less energy, and can cool your house and heat your apartment in ways. Beyond technical solutions, I just want to say that I want to be clear that everyone should, first of all, take care of themselves and not put themselves in a dangerous situation. It's really important to make sure that if you are particularly vulnerable to heat, that you take yourself out of that situation.

I also think that public cooling centers, investing in public cooling centers like libraries, school gyms, on the hottest of days can be really helpful. I also think that learning to live in slightly hotter temperatures, and I'm not talking about the hundreds, I'm talking about the eighties, is a learned skill. There's a lot of research that's emerging that bodies acclimatize after three to four weeks. Actually, by living in air conditioned spaces, say at the office or something like that, that you're actually making your body more vulnerable to heat related illness in a sudden uptick of temperatures.

Now we do have a limit of course, but simply by gradually practicing things like increasing the air flow in your apartment, taking cold showers, making sure that you're hydrating, having a fan. A fan does use electricity, but about 10% of that of an air conditioner. You're right, I think that as a cultural institution it's quite entrenched. This is part of what am up to in the book is to really just look at why it's so entrenched in American culture. Because, I'm not sure that policy, even the strictest policy that's mandated at the federal level and the state levels will have an effect if people aren't willing to try an alternative.

An alternative to being chill at 65 degree weather. You don't need to be in a completely stable 65 degree weather all the time, but it's really a conundrum. I think you hit on a great question.

Rebecca Ibarra: I have to say when family members visit me from Mexico, they're always cold indoors. They're like, "Why is it always so cold in the US?" We actually got an interesting tweet from a user named Carlita and she says, I put, or they say, I put solar reflective window film on my windows, keep them closed during daytime and open them all at night with intake fans at night for free AC whenever possible. Only using AC when temps fail to lower sufficiently at night.

Solar reflective window film, I think that's interesting. We have a couple of minutes left, so maybe we should get to one more caller. Let's go to Case, in Manhattan, you have a question about the energy saver function on the AC. Case, what's your question? We only have a few minutes left.

Case: Okay, I'll talk fast. To answer the question about how you limit energy use in your home. I always keep my AC units on energy saver when I use them, and I'm wondering if that makes a significant difference or a difference at all other than to make me feel better about myself and if so, what that difference is.

Rebecca Ibarra: Thank you so much for your question, Case. Eric.

Eric Dean Wilson: It's a great question. I don't know that the direct answer to that, I'm sure that it does help and you should definitely use the energy safer function. I don't know the technical aspects of it. What I do to lay alongside that, and again, not to put the entire burden on individual consumers, because I don't really have a lot of hope in consumer activism. I do have a lot of hope in people understanding how this problem is systemic and then demanding change from policy makers.

What's interesting is that, per capita, the United States uses more energy for air conditioning per person than any other country in the world. Including some of the hottest places in the world. What is concerning to me is that yes, we need renewable energy, we need more energy efficient technologies. What's happening is the very strict narrow model of comfort in the United States is being exported to other places that are now demanding the very kind of comfort, this very limited narrow window of comfort. In places like Indonesia and China and India, for instance.

As things become more technologically energy efficient, the number of people cooling is growing rapidly, exponentially. The gains that we make on energy efficiency are quickly being overtaken by the number of people in the world who are cooling, who should have every right to cool. This is the Gordian knot of air conditioning. I don't have a clear answer for you, but, all to say that you should definitely use that energy saver button.

Rebecca Ibarra: Our guest has been Eric Dean Wilson from Flatbush, beautiful Flatbush, Brooklyn, Queens cCllege writing instructor and the author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. Eric, thank you so much for coming on the Brian Lehrer show.

Eric Dean Wilson: Thank you so much, Rebecca. Have a great day.

 

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.