But leave me and my beloved Siemens out of this.”. Go sit in your stupid fucking car and sweat to your heart�s content. Dumb, but that doesn’t account for the vitriol spewed forth from A/C-loving bloggers: “You don�t like aircon? Fine. Another real-world example: Joe Klein wrote an obnoxious article about why he doesn’t like air conditioning, and then segues into why his bias was proven correct when it turned out to be bad for the planet. Obviously, the whole exchange was done in jest, but it’s surprisingly useful in distilling the basic thrust of our conversation about A/C. Then, AJ Daulerio responds by noting that he doesn’t like being hot and compares Nolan to a hydrofracking-hating Alec Baldwin walking around with a blanket on his head. He does so in typically Gawkerian fashion. Hamilton Nolan, a native Floridian, argues that we’ve become too reliant on artificial refrigeration, that it has led us to inhabit climes we’re unsuited for, that it uses too much energy, and that it’s made us weak. Gawker has an amusing point/counterpoint on A/C that pretty perfectly encapsulates this dynamic. You may have encountered such a rebuttal yourself.
“Air conditioning consumes too much electricity, and is largely unnecessary.” Regardless of the substance of any particular conversation about the merits of air conditioning, most non-New York Times sanctioned debates devolve into something resembling the following: So we rarely discuss why exactly it is people get so worked up when anyone suggests that it might be a good idea to wean ourselves off the habit of installing refrigerators in our windows. Getting that idea off the ground is uphill battle enough.
Treehugger’s archive is loaded with posts about why air conditioning is a menace to society (abridged version: it encourages folks to live in hot, unsustainable areas, it nudges architects towards lazy, inefficient building design, and, obvs, it uses a shitload of energy). The New York Times saw fit to host a debate on that topic last week anyway, and Lloyd promptly skewered the ‘we should treat A/C like clean air’ contingent. If you believe that air conditioning is a human right, you are most likely either a techno-utopianist or an entitled asshole. Unfortunately, we’re all entitled a-holes.
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