Invented to cool and de-humidify factories, they are a product of our love of work, our manufacturing roots.
Transitioned to consumer use use via the movie theater in the 20's, where they enabled the expansion of the movie theater season through the hot hot summer, where they enabled the invention of the summer blockbuster- which we all know is still an excuse to keep cool.
Brought in to domestic spaces in the 50's, air conditioning was a populist modern luxury. They made and continue to make structures that would otherwise be insufferably hot in to pleasant places to be, they enable design that does not consider its location.
Air conditioning, unfortunately, makes the world warmer. I review the second law of thermodynamics: warmth moves to where it is cooler. To resist this phenomena requires a machine that uses energy, which at some point along the line produces heat. Air conditioners resist entropy, the smallest scale of equalizing working to blend the temperatures of the world. It is a mechanic force of making the world more complicated: indoors colder, outdoors warmer, we are vacillating through increasing extremes.
Air conditioners are part of the one big iconic problem: they use massive amounts of electricity-generally unsustainably produced, and also usually require chloroflourocarbons to function, thus radiating this known ozone depleter into their air everywhere.
cold inside today, hotter outside tomorrow. Air conditioners are:
a commonly held privilege that none of us should have to need
a totally unsustainable self-quarantine against danger and discomfort
a self-protection from the reality of heat
a buying yourself time away from the hot future and the hot masses.
a short term solution to a long term problem on a scale beyond what any of us can control.
an urban coping: totally necessary in spaces engineered not by the people who use them, an important public health tool in this hot hot summer.
an unavoidably unsustainable response to our increasing isolated disasters, but unfortunately unsustainability itself is an accelerating long disaster within in which all of these independent events can be situated. We respond to the benign disaster of a heat wave with contribution to a greater one.
Should we suck it up and live with the heat? There's good reasons to say so: heat tolerance is a skill we are loosing, with all our cooled spaces. Cold air allows us year round access to gluttony that appetite-suppressing weather interrupts. Cold air soothes irritated throats, allergies, asthma, and thus masks our terrible air quality, while only contributing to the problem. But air conditioning allows us respite from these health conditions, which none of us volunteered for, and from the poor passive cooling of our urban and suburban spaces. It protects us against these fundamental discomforts, soothes us to the point of ability to continue functioning. Wildly, obscenely overused- but where do we draw the line? and whose job is it to draw?
