Is Air Conditioning Heating Up the Planet?

Stan Cox is a senior researcher at the Land Institute. His book, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air Conditioned World, describes the threat that our ever-increasing need for air conditioning poses to efforts to maintain our planetary climate within its natural limits, the limits that all living things on the planet have evolved to thrive in.

Consider these facts.

• With temperatures rising, those with air conditioning will be using it more frequently.


• As people in developing countries move into the middle class, they will buy air conditioners as a high priority item, especially in hot countries like India.


• Much of the electricity for these units is provided by fossil fuels, which contribute to global warming


• New refrigerants called HFC’s, which were developed to avoid the impact on the ozone layer associated with CFC’s, are, unfortunately, potent greenhouse gases (GHG) and these will eventually leak out

Furthermore, air conditioning has encouraged people to move into and develop previously uninhabitable areas (e.g. Phoenix)  that are inherently unsustainable without massive inflows of energy and fresh water. These people are now totally dependent on air conditioning for their survival.

Cox was recently a guest on Diane Rehm’s radio talk show on NPR as part of her Environmental Outlook series. In that program Cox claimed that the overall impact of air-conditioning systems in both vehicles and buildings today is almost half a billion metric tons, which is about 7% of the US total.  Cox went on to say that if we remain on our current course, we can expect electricity used to power air-conditioners to increase tenfold by 2050. This is despite significant increases in a/c efficiency which has gone up 30% just in the past few years. He goes on to say that in many instances, air-conditioning is “non-essential.”

Cox has done a valuable service in calling attention to this important issue, though I would have to say that his concerns going forward are somewhat exaggerated. There are a number of forces already at play in a variety of areas that will drive these numbers lower. As we move forward and the need becomes even more apparent, these forces will most certainly be joined by others.

A number of the following ideas were pointed out by Diane’s other guests on the show, including Steve Yurek of the Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, Durwood Zaelke of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, and NY Times environmental reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal, as well as various callers.

Among these are, on the equipment side: non-refrigerated cooling (such as evaporative cooling), geothermal heat pumps (which can pump heat into or out of a building), thermal energy storage systems (in which ice is made at night, when it can be done more efficiently, and used the following day to cool buildings), energy recovery ventilators (that extract heat and moisture from fresh air coming in), and absorption cooling in which a heat source is substituted for the mechanical action of the compressor. This latter opens the door for solar cooling, which is a tremendously appealing concept, since the energy source is always present when it is needed most.

On the building side, there are advanced control systems, which should help eliminate the problem of freezing indoors when it’s hot outside, advanced window glazing with optically reflective coatings, improved insulation and air sealing technology and passive solar design which takes building orientation, window location, and material selection into account before a structure is erected.

Then, of course, on the behavioral side, there is awareness raising and the possibility that people can be convinced that it doesn’t have to be winter cold inside during the summer (and summer hot during the winter.)

There will be new, energy efficient, low carbon, and renewable energy sources.

And finally, there will be government action. For starters, an international agreement along the lines of the Montreal Protocol, to further regulate the use of refrigerants to eliminate those with high heat-trapping GHG characteristics is urgently needed. The Montreal Protocol, widely recognized as the most successful environmental agreement ever passed, has not only dramatically reduced the hole in the ozone layer, it also, according to Zaelke, avoided the release of a volume of GHG emissions so high it would have exacerbated our current climate worries by an additional fifty percent! This agreement will eventually be followed by a truly meaningful international agreement on greenhouse emissions directly with mechanisms that will incorporate the true societal cost of various alternatives into the economics of energy.

There can be no doubt that such an agreement will eventually be passed. But sadly, thanks largely to intransigence on the part of the U.S. delegation; it is already too late to avoid significant harm.

 

[Image credit: dabblelicious: Flickr Creative Commons]

RP Siegel, PE, is an inventor, consultant and author. He co-wrote the eco-thriller Vapor Trails, the first in a series covering the human side of various sustainability issues including energy, food, and water in an exciting and entertaining format. Now available on Kindle.

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