2012 | Losing Our Cool

My thinking about that starts with the assumption that to do permanent damage to the ecosphere is wrong, absolutely wrong and that when these extraction enterprises to produce fuel, destroy permanently, parts of the world. That’s wrong, there’s no excuse for it. And for that reason, I’m not taking anybody very seriously who’s talking about energy, who isn’t talking about rationing.

When I first told Wes Jackson that I was writing a book on rationing, he said, “You have to read Carter Henderson’s The Inevitability of Petroleum Rationing in the United States.” Published by the Princeton Center for Alternative Futures in 1978, this 77-page gem is extremely difficult to find in print, and as far as I can tell, does not exist in digital form. But after 18 months of searching, Wes came up with his old copy:

By then, Any Way You Slice It was finished, so I could not take advantage of Henderson’s extensive insights into the 1970s energy shortages. He was focused primarily on gasoline rationing and, like me, did not like provisions in the Nixon and Carter plans that would have allocated rations to licensed drivers or vehicles. Henderson and I would have an equal ration go to every adult, so that those who do not drive can benefit by selling their rations. Henderson would have them sold on a “white market.” I’d rather see them sold back to the government (as explained in the Al Jazeera article above).

I know – You’d rather not talk about rationing. It’s a word that people often loathe and fear. Health care expert Henry Aaron has compared mentioning the possibility of rationing to “shouting an obscenity in church.” Yet societies in fact ration food, water, medical care, and fuel all the time, with those who can pay the most getting the most. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has said, the results can be “thoroughly unequal and nasty.”

In Any Way You Slice It, I discuss how rationing is not just a quaint practice restricted to World War II memoirs and 1970s gas station lines. Instead, it’s a vital concept for our fragile present, an era of dwindling resources and environmental crises. Any Way You Slice It takes us on a fascinating search for alternative ways of apportioning life’s necessities, from the goal of “fair shares for all” during wartime in the 1940s to present-day water rationing in a Mumbai slum, from the bread shops of Cairo to the struggle for fairness in American medicine and carbon rationing on Norfolk Island in the Pacific. The big question: can we limit consumption while assuring everyone a fair share?

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Backlash

In A/C news, About the book on August 2, 2012 at 7:30 am

The inevitable pro-air-conditioning backlash has come from Slate in the form of an article by Daniel Engber. His chief arguments are that heating in the US uses more total energy than does air-conditioning, and that air-conditioning can protect health in severe heat waves. Those are points that I make in Losing Our Cool as well, and they don’t amount to a justification of air-conditioning.

Heating may still use more energy than cooling even with today’s hotter summers, but air-conditioning creates more greenhouse emissions. Here’s why. Air-c0nditioners are powered almost totally by electricity (for buildings) and liquid fossil fuels (for cars) and always requires climate-unfriendly refrigerants. Most heating is done by burning fuels directly. The inefficiencies of electricity generation and transmission and the fact that it is done largely with coal and fuel oil means higher emissions. If you count only energy use and only buildings, A/C is responsible for under 300 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually versus more than 400 for heating. But add in vehicle A/C and the greenhouse impact of refrigerants, and the total climate impact of air-conditioning is almost 450 million metric tons CO2 equivalent, versus 415 for heating.

But the much more important point is that most of that heating is necessary (even if the energy could be used more efficiently) whereas most of that air-conditioning is not (or is what we might call a “created necessity” because of the way we have constructed buildings and cities and arranged our transportation system.) So the factors that have decreased demand for heating, including the great southward migration and global warming, represent a missed opportunity to save energy. All of the emissions–and then some–that could have been spared because of lower heating demand have been replaced by cooling emissions.

I have dealt with the heat wave argument many times. The use of air-conditioning to protect people of advanced age or poor health against deadly heat waves accounts for a tiny percentage of total A/C use; by far the greatest use is of a completely different kind, in situations that do not warrant a refrigerated environment. I noted recently, for example, that “keeping vulnerable members of our communities alive during heat emergencies is one thing; using that as an excuse for neglecting horrible urban living conditions while at the same time tolerating the routine, lavish deployment of chilled air throughout much of the rest of society is another.”

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Losing Our Cool in the Media

In A/C news, About the book on June 5, 2012 at 8:55 pm

The Atlantic: Cox is the 2012 Readers’ Choice “Brave Thinker“

A New York Time forum: Should Air-Conditioning be RationedA debate

An A/C debate: the Diane Rehm Show on NPR

Cox in the Washington Post on “D.C. without A.C.“

Brad Plumer, Washington Post: a “fascinating” book

Al Jazeera: Cold reality

Yale e360 and the Guardian: Global Cooling

Here’s my presentation on America and the air-conditioned dream, in pdf format, from the Gulf Coast Green conference in Houston, May 1, 2012

And:

Last summer: NPR Morning Edition, ABCNews.com, Chicago Tribune, Hartford Courant, London’s Daily Mail

As well as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , FOX Business, and KWCH-TV

Recently with VICE magazine’s Motherboard.tv

Former Amazon employee and author Nichole Gracely thanks Losing Our Cool for not supporting her old bosses.

New York Times: “No Air-Conditioning, and Happy“

Kevin Canfield on Losing Our Cool in the Los Angeles Times

A review by Mother Nature Network, which named Losing Our Cool one of the “Ten must-read environmental books of 1010″

Al Jazeera: Cold Reality

David Owen in The New Yorker on “The Efficiency Dilemma” (Dec. 20-27, 2010; sorry, subscription-only)

Cox in the Los Angeles Times on how we live and work in the A/C world

An interview with Ryan Brown of Salon.com

The A/C dilemma in the Persian Gulf

Chicago Sun-Times (pdf): Mark Brown tries to convince his wife to turn off the A/C

Hear an interview with Cox on NPR’s Marketplace, and read tips on keeping cool

Hear “Chilling Facts About Air Conditioners“, a one-hour interview and call-in with Stan Cox on the NPR program On Point

The downside of A/C on NPR’s Here and Now

Watch the KSN-TV report, also seen on the Weather Channel and NBC affiliates across the U.S.

Hear “Life without Air-Conditioning” on The Takeaway

Cox on the A/C life in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

More on keeping cool from Yes! magazine

Tom Condon on Losing Our Cool in the Hartford Courant

With National Geographic News Watch

Rob Sharp in The Independent (UK): Cold Comfort

Cox answers adversaries via CounterPunch

Does this A/C make me look fat?

The Wichita Eagle on Losing Our Cool

The Foreign Policy Association blog

Losing Our Cool interview: video on MSNBC

A review by the Dallas Morning News

An article on Losing Our Cool in the Boston Globe.

Q&A on A/C in the business world, in the New York Post

Jason Zasky talks with Cox: Failure magazine

Interview with the Belgrave Trust

Interview (mp3) with Alex Smith of Radio Ecoshock

KWCH-TV interview

A Minneapolis Star-Tribune interview

Glenn Beck doesn’t want to hear about turning off the A/C

Nevada shaped by fans of A/C: the Las Vegas Sun

TIME on the history of air-conditioning

An interview with the National Post‘s Joe O’Connor

Macleans: How Air-Conditioning Changed the World

An A/C Q&A with Discovery’s Planet Green

How to stay cool without A/C even in America’s hot zones

A CBC Radio interview

Stan Cox in the Hartford Courant: Air-Conditioning is Sapping Our Society

Paul Cox: “Birth of the Air Conditioner“

Read Chapter 1 of Losing Our Cool:

Read Chapter 1 here

Publisher’s Weekly reviews Losing Our Cool.

A review in the Cleveland Plain Dealer

A Globe and Mail interview on staying cool in Canada

An essay written by Stan Cox for Powell’s Books: “In Making Our Own Weather, Have We Remade Ourselves?”.

A May 19 story in the Salina Journal.

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The politics of food

In About the book on May 6, 2012 at 8:12 pm

Iraq’s sagging safety net

Salina, Kansas, 30 Apr 2012 – In February 2011, with grassroots uprisings having toppled the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, unrest was swelling in Iraq as well. In response, the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced that it was postponing a planned purchase of eighteen F-16 fighter planes from the United States. The money saved would be used, said al-Maliki, to provide Iraq’s poorest citizens with increased monthly rations from the country’s public food distribution system (PDS). The cancellation was a stark acknowledgment that when people are hungry, armaments won’t keep a country secure …

The politics of bread in Egypt

Salina, Kansas, 10 Mar 2012 – As Egypt’s revolution moves into what could be its most crucial phase, its supporters are demanding that the slogan “bread, dignity, and social justice” be recognized as more than a slogan. But a recent United Nations report warns that “economic issues, which have been central to the Arab uprisings, are trailing behind the political issues” in the struggle over the future of Egypt and its neighbours, “potentially risking the erosion of popular support for democratic transition if they are not properly addressed”.On the list of economic issues in Egypt, food is never far from the top …

Will India’s poor remain hungry?

Salina, Kansas, 26 Jan 2012 – As India’s proposed new Food Security Act hovers in political limbo, the nation remains hungry. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made headlines in early January when he labelled the fact that 44 per cent of children less than five years old were underweight and 65 children die each day of malnutrition “a national shame”. In all, 21 per cent of all Indians are undernourished.

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Losing Our Cool

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In the Media

Rationing: You might just like it

Backlash

Losing Our Cool in the Media

The politics of food

Iraq’s sagging safety net

The politics of bread in Egypt

Will India’s poor remain hungry?

About the Book

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