Morning, all; I'm not officially sitting in for Rod while he's away this weekend, but I have been keeping an eye on the conversations. Rod generously gave me permission to put up a post or two, as well, so I hope you don't mind hearing from me this morning.
It's early--before 6:30 a.m. as I write this--because my family goes to Mass early. As early as it is, you can already tell that it's going to be another unbelievably hot day here; a heavy haze hangs over the sunrise-coated scene outside my window, and there's a stickiness in the air that even air conditioning can't quite dispel. Moods, as anyone can understand, get a little fragile in this weather; it's easy to be cranky and impatient with each other.
I was thinking about both of these things--moods, and air conditioning--yesterday when my family and I were out running errands. One of these took us into a warehouse-club store, and as I looked at the drab, scowling faces of my fellow shoppers I was very tempted to judge them out of hand for their gloom. But then I wondered what my own face looked like. It was very hot outside, I didn't particularly want to be shopping, some of our errands had been unsuccessful, and this was the last stop of a long day of shopping. My fellow shoppers and I may or may not have been carrying any great unknown burdens, but we were all lugging around at least the heat and the way it saps your energy, and none of us were the better for it.
But the other thing I pondered was how this store, the others we'd been to, our day of running errands in hundred-degree weather, were all only possible because of air conditioning, and the huge amount of energy use it requires. I don't know whether people in southern climates use more energy to air condition homes and businesses in the summer than is used by people in northern ones to heat their homes in winter, but it wouldn't be surprising if that were the case. Yet without air conditioning, many of these places where we can live comfortably would be quite different in the heat of the summer than they are; not just uncomfortable, but in some cases, for some people, dangerous.
Still, plenty of people live in very hot climates without any air conditioning at all. Even places in America where air conditioning is ubiquitous had little of it a surprisingly short number of decades ago. If the energy costs of cooling huge buildings, smaller stores, and even much smaller homes ever got to be more than we could sustain, we might have to go back to old-fashioned ways of dealing with the heat.
And that would mean, in addition to building homes in such a way that open windows provided good cross-breezes and to building stores that would allow for more natural ventilation, an adjustment in our moods. People in the past endured this heat without any artificial cooling, and they didn't drag themselves around grumpy and cranky all day--because they knew better than to drag themselves around at all in the heat of the afternoon, and lived life at a slower, quieter, less consumer-minded pace.
Could you, if you live in a hot climate or if it's hot where you are right now, live without air conditioning? Do you already do this in your own homes? If you do it, or if you'd like to, what changes to your way of life have made or would make the transition possible?
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But there is simply NO WAY there could be office buildings and malls in the South at anywhere close to the scale they are now without AC.
This is an excellent point. Those big sealed-window office towers are unlivable without AC, even in a temperate climate like San Francisco.
But I think that if energy prices rise to where constant airconditioning of such buildings is impossibly expensive, the market will take care of it, not without some pain I imagine.
Leases in commercial buildings like that are written to place the burden of increased taxes, increased operating costs, just about everything, on the tenants. Unless your landlord is very unlike ours, landlords don't just eat increased energy costs; they get passed on straight through to the tenants. So, if providing AC to those spaces like quadruples in cost, leases in such buildings are going to become very very expensive, and a lot of tenants are going to reconsider where they locate. Maybe windows you can open are not such a bad idea after all, huh. Those big office boxes are going to empty out faster than you can say "triple the rent for space down the street."
At that point some sort of retrofit will be developed, and if all such alternatives are themselves impossibly expensive, wrecking equipment will show up, and more sensible buildings will arise.
Americans are quite adaptive. Just because we've painted ourselves into a corner with impractical architecture doesn't mean we can't get out.
Remember, New Orleans, which has a completely impossible climate, hot and muggy, was a major city and major port, where people got lots and lots of work done, a hundred years before anyone even heard of air conditioning.
I remember returning to Karachi, Pakistan after my freshmany year in college in Southern California and stepping out of the air conditioned plane to a sauna-like tarmac. The monsoons had cut electricity, so I was faced with life in the sauna of a Karachi summer. I remember in the evening trying to write my friends by the light of a candle, but in order to see, I had to keep the candle close enough to my face that the additional heat made it almost unbearable. I also remember a talking-to from my father after I'd whined about wanting to go back to CA, about how ungracious it was of me to voice such a sentiment after a year away from home.
But I also remember that summer helping out in a Mother Teresa orphanage without air conditioning and finding it quite bearable because, as so many people here have noted, it had the high ceilings and windows (and ceiling fans going at low speed) that provided a good flow of air.
But in graduate school in Atlanta, I lived in an 1903 house without air conditioning and got so acclimated that I disliked air conditioning, finding it way too cold.
Re: The Romans, for example, had indoor plumbing, including toilets.
No, the Romans did not have "indoor plumbing"-- not in any remotely modern sense. What they had were indoor latrines-- outhouse-style toilets that drained into sewers when running water was available to clear them out. In dry seasons they didn't work so well-- and in heavy rains they tended to overflow, at least in low lying areas. And only the rich had these conveniences in their own homes (and just in the cities) while everyone else used a public (and exceedingly non-private) facility, or else a chamber pot. Nothing hugh tech about any of it. Moreover such facilities continued to exist all through the Middle Ages and into modern times, in the cities (such as they were) in castles (where they drained into the moat), in monasteries, and in large, permanent military forts-- anyplace large numbers of people were domiciled so that waste disposal became an issue. Visit the old fort at St Augustine and you will find an early modern example which drained into the sea close at hand.
As for air conditioning, the hatred heaped on it by eco-puritans resembles more the hate Savonarola had for Botticelli's pagan paintings than any true concern for the environment. Unlike heating (which generally requires burning fossil fuels, or wood) AC has no necessary link to CO2 emissions. It requires only electricity, which can be generated without fossil fuels after all, and as such I suspect it will be with us indefinitely, while the gas- or oil-burning furnace, and the gasoline powered internal combustion engine will not.
"At that point some sort of retrofit will be developed, and if all such alternatives are themselves impossibly expensive, wrecking equipment will show up, and more sensible buildings will arise."
But my point is that you'll never be able to fit that much office space -- therefore that much economic activity -- in "more sensible buildings" without using up a whole lot of land and/or other resources.
I'm not saying that it's wonderful that we have windowless skyscrapers, I'm saying that without them, the populated and economically thriving South that we have could not exist. Maybe it's not sustainable, but if a breakdown or some kind of "refit" of building space occurs, it will come at the cost of a less populated, less GDP producing South. Whether that's good, bad, or simply inevitable I can't see how it could be otherwise. Without AC, one way or the other, you don't have what you have now.
AIR Force
4ulv
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