Air conditioning was drawn into the culture wars this summer in the UK, joining a long list of things to be angry about, alongside flags, pronouns and National Trust scones. Now we have the tangled irony of people continuing to deny that climate change is real, while falsely claiming that they are being denied measures to adapt to climate change.
There is no big agenda against air conditoning, though there are some reasons to be cautious about it. It isn’t common in the UK and it would be expensive and disruptive to retrofit it everywhere. Since it moves heat outside the house, A/C in densely populated areas raises outdoor temperatures for your neighbours, which is why installations are restricted in some places.
It also uses a lot of energy if everyone’s running their A/C at once on a hot day, putting extra strain on the grid. That’s fine if we’re using solar on a sunny day, but where the grid is still gas or coal, that creates a vicious circle: burning more fossil fuels to escape the consequences of burning fossil fuels.
Hence the scepticism around A/C as a silver bullet solution to overheating, and why some green campaigners warn against it.
As always, what we need most is nuance and honest conversations, though I don’t think it’s particularly complicated. Air conditioning is a technology for managing internal building temperatures, same as a heating system. The more efficient the building is, the less you need those technologies.
If you can design a well insulated building that keeps the heat in during the winter, you don’t need much heating. If you design a building to keep the heat out in summer, you don’t need any extra cooling technologies.
You wouldn’t turn your heating on and then let all the warmth out through your windows in winter. And you shouldn’t depend on air conditioning while letting the heat in through your windows in summer.
In other words, if we build homes well and live in them sensibly, we might not need much air conditioning. If it turns out some buildings can’t do without it, or that some people need cooling more than others, then let’s fit A/C and not be absolutist about it. But a lot of us might not need it. We can do simpler and cheaper things first, and we’ll save a fortune if we do.
That’s my view, and the approach I suggest to schools that overheat as well. DW Planet A made a video on this subject recently that’s well worth a watch. I’ve mentioned some of these things recently myself, but here’s their take on what we could be doing instead of installing air conditioning.
The Earthbound Report 