At night during the summer, my husband sets up a big metal box fan — yellow, decades old, with three speeds powered by three dusty blades — and blows it out the west-facing window in his upstairs den. Then he sucks in the cooler evening air from outdoors by closing every window in the house except three in the bedrooms and one in the living room (to please the dog who commandeers the couch).

This is our old-fashioned, climate-friendly version of air-conditioning, along with ceiling fans in the kitchen, the main bedroom and my home office, a north-facing spare bedroom where I sleep on hot nights because of the bed’s access to the open window. When we first moved to this old house in 2013, we occasionally used a portable air-conditioning unit in the front bedroom, but it was noisy and blocked the light during the day and kept waking me at night every time it clunked off and on. So, we hauled the dripping unit out to the boulevard, where someone quickly claimed it.

For them it was a find, like the perfectly good snow shovels I lugged home from an alley last spring. For me — raised in a household with open windows and floor fans, back when air-conditioning was a nonessential for the middle class — the portable unit symbolized the hedonistic tendencies of our self-absorbed culture. Doing without it was one small way to side with Mother Nature in a battle she inevitably will win.

Where comfort counts

Air-conditioning is a luxury that the vast majority of Americans now judge to be a necessity, and far more of us, especially in Minnesota, could live without it. As a person who tolerates the heat fairly well, in part because I have trained myself to do it, I would welcome not having to shiver in every bus, grocery store, movie theater and office building — enduring this artificial, overcooled air because some HVAC company tells me it is civilized. A symbol of prosperity and progress.

That progress, unfortunately, is costing the planet — fueling the very climate crisis from which air-conditioning helps us hide.

Ninety percent of households in the United States have air-conditioning, compared with 60 percent in China, 16 percent in Mexico and 5 percent in India; versions of those data, from 2016, were cited again this July in news alerts about the record-breaking heat worldwide.

• Cranking up the AC during the increasingly common heat waves in the United States already is taxing electrical grids, potentially creating “one of the largest sources of rising electricity demand around the world,” according to one scientific estimate.
• Americans who have central air tend to keep their homes cooler, at a sweater-ready 74 degrees even when they’re gone and about 70 degrees when they are home.
• Air-conditioning is less common in Europe, which historically has been cooler than the south and southwestern regions of the United States.
• Two-thirds of the world could have air-conditioning by 2050, as rising temperatures change the perceived need for cooling and as developing nations seek to mimic the comforts that most people in the United States — even those struggling to pay their electrical bills — have long enjoyed.

Indeed, air conditioning represents one of the most insidious challenges of climate change, and one of the most difficult technological problems to fix. The more the world warms, the more we’ll need cooling — not merely for comfort, but for health and survival in large parts of the world.

James Temple, MIT Technology Review, September 1, 2020

Summer in the city

On a cool Sunday afternoon, a comfortable 74 degrees, it’s easy to forget how daunting July 2023 has been. More than 90 million Americans were under heat alerts earlier this week, according to PBS NewsHour. The month itself was the hottest on human record.

I read about farmers trying to keep their animals cool in rural Minnesota; about a man who died at a bus stop in Phoenix, Arizona, where temperatures climbed to over 110 degrees for 27 days in a row; about wildfires blazing in Mediterranean countries. Closer to home, I smelled acrid air in my own yard from Canadian wildfires hundreds of miles north and saw more watering bags going around the thin-trunked saplings that the city planted on boulevards to replace sturdier trees lost to Emerald Ash Borer.

But still, I went outside during our recent record heat wave. I like the heat. I’m a lifelong Minnesotan. We wait for months, from late October until mid-April, for warm weather. Even on the afternoon when it was 96 degrees, with an excessive heat warning, I stood by my decision not to cave on air-conditioning, to cave in to the popular notion that we couldn’t live without it.

Years earlier, when we were selling the family home in Northfield, I wouldn’t budge when the Realtor said the house would move more quickly — and fetch a higher price — if we installed central air. My family had lived comfortably in the house for 20 years. “There’s always one hot week in July when we hang out in the basement,” I told her. “Otherwise, we have plenty of cross breezes and ceiling fans. Find buyers who are green.”

And that’s the point. Minnesotans readily adapt to changing seasons. We think nothing of living differently in the winter: reading more, wearing layers of clothing, making stews and soups, staying home at night with Netflix. Similarly, we can find novel and healthful ways to stay cool, if we resist or cannot afford the immediate relief of air conditioning.

I sent my husband, who is less heat-tolerant than I am, to see Oppenheimer one evening this past week at our historic local movie theater. The next day, he wandered through the cool galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

There is a long history of industry-funded “deflection campaigns” aimed to divert attention from big polluters and place the burden on individuals.

Michael E. Mann, Time magazine, September 12, 2019

I chose to embrace the weather, as I do during the winter: biking to my errands with an extra side of water and sunscreen; reading on the porch at night and watching vehicles sealed up like tombs against the heat. Moving more slowly, giving myself permission to push away from the computer and relax, to call a friend. Like a snow day in July.

This heat wave, now over, was of our own making: our driving, our air-conditioning, our consumerism, our conveniences. Personal habit change won’t solve the climate crisis, it is said. But right here, today, surveying what little I can control: I see it as the only choice we have.