This opinion piece is so on-brand for the New York Times: “I Swore Off Air-Conditioning, and You Can, Too”. We’re facing a serious threat from global warming, so let’s tell all the little people to get off their butts and fix it rather than addressing the systemic contributions of capitalism and the petrochemical industry.
Most of those savings were likely the result of using fans instead of air-conditioning. We also kept other appliances and devices turned off as much as possible because they, too, generate heat. Dishwashers are double trouble, putting out heat and humidity. We don’t have one.
You can’t unplug the refrigerator, of course, but we keep ours set for just under 40 degrees, the highest safe temperature, according to the Food and Drug Administration. And we dry our laundry on the clothesline out back.
When it gets too hot, we lightly spray water on our arms, legs and faces; the water helps dissipate a lot of heat. A quick, cold shower or a little time spent with that all-American favorite, the lawn sprinkler, also can bring relief.
In summer we’ll spend as many of our at-home hours as we can outdoors, in the shady city park down the street or on our screened porch.
Well, fine. I agree with all that. We do many of those things, too — we’ve got an ’emergency air conditioner’ in the window of our bedroom that we’ve used for about a week this year, but otherwise, yes, we mainly get by on low-energy alternatives. I think it’s a good idea to be mindful about how our lives impact the environment, and turning off an appliance now and then is smart and helpful. But does this actually substantially offset the fact that we live in cities that are dependent on the automobile? Worse, we’re surrounded by pervasive marketing telling us to buy massive trucks, that we have to go to a mall with a gigantic parking lot to buy cheap plastic widgets we don’t need made in China, while wearing clothes from Shein that we’ll throw into a landfill next week. There are a lot of sensible changes we could make in our lifestyles that the New York Times would get in trouble with their advertisers if they started promoting them.
OK, here’s the Batagaika Crater in Siberia.
That’s a huge “retrogressive thaw slump”, a hole that is visible from space and is steadily growing as the permafrost thaws and its edges collapse. Here’s a drone photo of the slow-motion disaster:
Spectacular and horrifying.
Permafrost covers 15% of the land in the Northern Hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere.
One study estimated that permafrost thaw could emit as much planet-warming gases as a large industrial nation by 2100 if industries and countries don’t aggressively rein in their own emissions today.
How big is the contribution of this one feature in the landscape to climate change?
In a study published in the journal Geomorphology in June, researchers used satellite and drone data to construct 3D models of the megaslump and calculate its expansion over time.
They found that about 14 Pyramids of Giza’s worth of ice and permafrost had thawed at Batagay. The crater’s volume increases by about 1 million cubic meters every year.
“These values are truly impressive,” Alexander Kizyakov, the study’s lead author and a scientist at Lomonosov Moscow State University, told BI in an email.
“Our results demonstrate how quickly permafrost degradation occurs,” he added.
The researchers also calculated that the megaslump releases about 4,000 to 5,000 tons of carbon each year. That’s about as much as the annual emissions from 1,700 to 2,100 US homes’ energy use.
If only everyone in the USA would sprinkle a little water on their arms rather than turning on the air conditioner, we could compensate for that problem. Or better yet, think of all the energy you could save by cancelling your subscription to the NY Times!
Really, though, we need something more than these piecemeal token changes in individual behavior.
One of the issues with fighting global warming by turning off the AC is that global warming is steadily causing more places to heat up to the point where AC because a necessity rather than a luxury. Sprinkling water around/using a swamp cooler is fine if you live in a place that’s got low humidity in the summer like the West Coast, but it’s going to be effective in a region with a humid summer like the South or East Coast.
So much attention is given to the whole ‘You can help solve the ____ crisis by doing these simple things’ line of marketing. And so much of all of that is very actively promoted by the very industries who are creating the problems. Whether it’s recycling to get rid of plastic and other waste, or energy use reduction to help with climate change, we can all be sucked in to the idea that, if only WE do our share, the problem will be resolved. My wife really got into the whole plastic recycling thing, to the point of trying to find places that would take every type of plastic we might happen to get in our purchases. I argued that, by doing so, she was just working hard to make herself feel better, while at the same time being a dupe to the fossil fuel industries decades-long campaign of lies. My son finally got her to back off by showing her research that showed that plastic recycling is not at all close to the claims made for its usefulness; that the cost — monetary and environmental — of recycling even the supposedly most environmentally friendly types, is not sustainable. We are much better off putting our efforts into using as little plastic as possible (which we already do), and using our voices and whatever (tiny amount of) political power we have in forcing the lying industries to be stopped.
Individual efforts will never stop the spiral we are in.
Do not want to be pessimistic but I see little change when it comes to energy consumption. If anything, energy consumption will increase as the planet warms. Also, as more people in third world countries improve their living conditions, more energy will be needed for them. Humans have a tendency to adapt and adjust rather than implement positive (preventative) change. We will create devices that will limit or reverse the amount of greenhouse gasses we are putting into the atmosphere. Governments are using legislation to force people to change their energy habits because we can’t do it on our own. I’ve absorbed massive amounts of currents events since my early teens. Read two newspapers every day until the internet took them away. Now I read voraciously on the internet daily. It was easy to spot this coming just by the number of articles over the years. My perception has evolved to it will be fixed after it breaks rather than prevent breakage. I try to practice a preventative lifestyle, but I do not see enough in my neighbors and the general population to supply me with much hope. Seems to be the way of the world. Apologize for the negativity
Like PZ, I only have a window AC that gets used a few days a summer when we get days where the night time temperature doesn’t go below 80 degrees. My house predates air conditioning, and is built to naturally cool via cross ventilation. Shade trees on the south wall also help to keep the interior at a comfortable temperature.
Not using my AC won’t do a thing to prevent climate change, but for some reason our utility company gives people with central AC a discount on their bill if they participate in a savers switch program. I think they should be charged a premium for having central AC in the first place. Plant a tree. Build to minimize summer heat gain in the first place.
Prevention is better than a cure.
I only really see three options: either rising fascism or mass famine sparks ww3, or both.
GASP! ACCELERATIONISM!!!
No, we must mollify the dimwitted conservative masses by doling out microscopic amounts of progress (that is, when the Democrats are in power and it’s convenient) even if it kills us!
And it will.
OK, if you live in Washington state, one thing you can do is vote NO on I-2117 in November. This initiative would repeal Washington’s Climate Commitment Act (a cap and trade auction system).
Sure, save a few kWh will not stop global warming, but on the other hand, if nobody is willing to change anything, nothing will happen.
Yes, laws are needed to really change things, but as soon as these laws seem to threaten peoples comfortable consumerism, voters will take care we can go back to polluting.
Consumer protection and maybe even some better environmental standards make stuff more expensive, so people order cheap crap directly from Chine, risking to poison or electrocute themselves.
The political climate here in Germany is another depressing example. Climate change has long reached the temperate zones, but environmental laws are now blamed for the recession and inflation and a large percentage of the voters want the conservatives or even the fascists in power and the Greens are attacked like the Communists during the cold war.
PZ wrote: we need something more than these piecemeal token changes in individual behavior.
I reply: As pointed out, the industrial polluters and their focus on beating up small polluters is criminal. Yes, it is important for individuals to reduce electricity use. Yes, we should avoid plastics (especially one use plastics) as much as possible. Yes, heat and chemical pollution by fossil fuels, nuclear power, wood burning home heating and infernal combustion exhaust need to be drastically reduced.
But, with all due respect, cold showers, misting your arms, and fans don’t work in a LOT of areas of this country. In scarizona, 50+% of the populace lives where the temperature gets to over 115 degrees F for months at a time. And, the humidity runs 40%-70%, so there is NO evaporative cooling. Texass and a lot of the south are similar.
The house of a neighbor, here in scarizona had good insulation. But, two years ago when the central air conditioner stopped working in the middle of the summer, with 5 ceiling fans and floor and box fans on, the temperature in the early afternoon reached 96 degrees F. The humidity was 40%-50+% so evaporative cooling did nothing. And, since they had to work in home offices, they could not spend extended time in ‘shady city parks’.
Our book Omniascendence has a section on Habitat. Construction techniques in most of this country are pitiful. There are ‘earth ships’ in New Mexico and houses in other locations that require not heating or air conditioning at all. And, they are built using recycled plastics where possible. The huge crapitallist corporations wouldn’t see enough profit to manufacture and build responsibly like that, so they won’t.
PZ, wrote: OK, here’s the Batagaika Crater in Siberia.
I reply, we saw programs about siberia and IIRC alaska where the permafrost is melting and massive amounts of methane spewed into the air. So, we must conclude that our climate is ‘cratering’ too.
PZ, wrote: think of all the energy you could save by cancelling your subscription to the NY Times!
I reply, we never had and never will have a subscription to the Yew Nork Slimes. The main stream media is so focused on MISDIRECTION and deceit, yet, most sheople just nod and read gulp down that koolaid.
In support of my previous post #3. This article on YAHOO (today) about landslides increasing due to human activity mining, global warming, etc. You can sew together all the articles pointing to climate change over the years and denying it will only make one ignorant.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/scientists-worrisome-connection-between-catastrophic-103000849.html
The Cool Down Scientists make worrisome connection between catastrophic landslide event and human activity — here’s what you should know
The WWA study asserts that the potential number of landslides is likely to increase because of “climate change-driven” rainfall. “It’s not like we don’t understand the problem or have the technology. We just don’t do it.”
Three days ago, it was 100F here. That’s actual air temperature- the heat index was higher. That’s not at all uncommon in our hot (and very humid) summers here.
The way this house was built (every corner that could be cut legally was cut, plus a few that probably weren’t legal), the air temperature inside is always hotter than the air temperature outside. Even in the winter time, it’s routinely 10F higher inside than out; in the summer it can easily be 30F higher with all the windows open.
130F is not “uncomfortable.” 130F is lethal, especially when you take into account that every person living in this house has some sort of lung problems. I am not going to commit slow, painful suicide just so that big companies can say “hey, look, the overall numbers are the same, so we can foul the air a little more!”
Because that is exactly what happens. That’s what all these little self-righteous, superior assholes who write articles like this, fuckwits who don’t have the first clue what it’s like to choke while trying to suck down air that feels like it’s passing through a scalding-hot washcloth, are accomplishing: they’re giving giant companies a little more breathing room to pollute.
By the way, assholes, you CAN unplug your refrigerator. Billions of people have no choice but to make do without fridges, but apparently you just don’t care enough about climate change to do so. Many of those people don’t have fans, either, and they can’t afford to “lightly spray water on [their] arms, legs and faces,” because they barely have enough to drink. Forget about cold showers, lawn sprinklers, lawns, and laundry, too.
I don’t drive, and I don’t have a car, but I don’t go around writing snotty articles about how ‘I’m doing my part to climate change, why aren’t you?’ because I recognize that CARS ARE A NECESSITY for far too many people in this country, because shitty car companies have spent billions to make sure that that’s the case. In my case, the shitty developer that built my house (and no, I can’t afford to move) ensured that AC is a necessity.
The problem is capitalism. The problem is the entire system of avarice and carefully-cultivated (by outlets like the New York Times!) indifference that rules this country. The problem is the rich fucks for whose sake the NYT exists.
And, just to be clear, I have been taking steps to cut down on my AC usage. I’ve been working on jury-rigging a way to insulate the walls of my house that get the most sun, using things like full bookshelves. Believe it or not, it’s helped lower the temp in here a few degrees. I’ve also made insulating curtains. If I can ever get the money, I’ll replace my windows.
It’s not a lot, but it’s what I can do. But ditching the AC? Not if I want to survive.
I live in Florida. Air Conditioning is a must. I do not cool my house to 72. I set my AC at 78 during the day and 76 at night. I could get through the year with out heat. What about people who live in more Northern climes. Could you live with out heat. I am sure my house with air conditioning has a smaller carbon foot print than a house in Minnesota.
I’m with Steve1. I live in Georgia and am a woman of a certain age who takes letrozole (look it up), enough said! ;-).
Seriously, I just finished reading A Darwinian Survival Guide by Brooks and Agosta. They think it’s going to take a lot more than just giving up air conditioning if any humans are to come out on the other side our current mass extinction event. Strangely I found hope in their book, since they reminded me that some species managed to make it through the last extinction events and some will make it through this one. It may not be us, but some form of life will survive.
Nobody is telling people they need to give up their AC, especially not in the desert or the sauna that is the SE and Gulf Coast areas of the US.
Energy efficient buildings with climate appropriate designs are something that can be done and will definitely reduce the need to burn fossil fuels if done nationwide.
There are funds available for low income people thanks to Bidens infrastructure funding bill.
https://www.energy.gov/scep/wap/weatherization-assistance-program
Tethys @#15
I’ve seen people expressing concern about the AC that “all those Indians” will need to survive future summers. So not so much ‘give up air-conditioning’ as ‘don’t get any despite heat levels that will kill’.
The source of the electricity is more important than the AC itself. If every home had its own solar and wind generating system, as well as green energy from utilities, there would be a large drop in total emissions.
Depends on the individual.
A billionaire emits a million times more greenhouse gases than the average person
That’s on-brand for pretty much every major news source ever since Exxon came out with their little climate footprint piece of software in the early 2000s. Classic misdirection; it’s not us, it’s everybody else! I spent the last several years looking into some of the top 100 companies that are climate problems, and guess what? Most of them are in the oil and mining industries! If you lok at their reports, they’ll claim to be reducing emissions by some paltry amount, usually 10-20%, but they’re counting on most people not knowing how far they still have to go, not looking into this stuff, or having more immediate problems of their own. Sets my teeth on edge.
What was that part about not using a dishwasher because it’s humid and hot? What does the author think is involved in manually washing dishes? Do they hand wash their dishes in something which is cool and not water?
This doesn’t even feel like a serious attempt to help. Automatic dishwashers save energy. They’re saying not to do that in order to help stay cool, when the alternative is manually washing dishes which involves sticking your hands into more hot water.
I know I have a nasty and conspiratorial mind, but this feels like a suggestion which is not intended to help and is instead intended to backfire and cause a feeling of personal guilt which keeps people from pursuing larger scale change.
Try living south Louisiana in the summer (and later spring and early autumn) without using AC at least part of the time. I use fans as much as I can so I can cut back the AC, such as when I’m sleeping. I can go for a day without AC (did it two days when AC was out recently). But it’s too blazing hot and humid to not have cool air during at least part of the daytime. I don’t know how people survived, especially in the swampy areas of Louisiana, Florida, Texas etc. before AC. My best guess is that if you live all the time without AC, you don’t miss it so much except in really hot weather. It had to be the same way in other hot places. Humans managed to survive for tens of thousands of years in hot deserts and hot, humid regions.
My mother, who was born in Richmond, Va., and grew up nearby, liked to say the South never really started to develop until AC came along. It’s partly true, but people built houses and had other ways to reduce heat stress. When I lived in Jackson, Miss., I was in an old house that had a very high ceiling and tall, narrow windows, which kept it a bit cooler than it would have been compared with a modern home not designed for the heat.
Nomad@20– It’s not just the trivial energy reduction. Automatic dishwashers use a lot less water, and it’s not marginal: on average a full load takes 13 L in a machine as opposed to 100 L for a hand wash. These NYT stooges are giving manifestly anti-environmental advice.
@Nomad:
Years ago, there was a musical video of a new hire at The New York Times or similar on a tour of the office, where the staff passing by sang about writing deliberately bad opinion pieces for engagement: something like “A click is a click is a click.”
Rachel Bloom, maybe? I can’t find it.
@wsierichs:
5 lessons from ancient civilizations
Ancient Rome had ways to counter the urban heat island effect
Ahh, found it. “A share is a share is a share.” Michelle Wolf. Daily Show correspondent was my second guess.
The Break – Op-Ed (4:12)
The rapid disarmament of the single largest polluter on the planet, the U.S. military, would be a good start. Stop all our wars; end all weapon shipments to our technology testbeds in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, South Korea, and Taiwan, among others; dismantle all our nuclear weapons; and close all our overseas military bases. That would be more than a piecemeal change. Perhaps it wouldn’t be enough, but it would give the world a little more time to figure something out.
The “massive truck” thing is not just marketing. There is some obscure mix of regulations, involving requirements for fuel efficiency, but also safety, required amounts of horse power for a truck, and a mess of other things, which kind of all directly contradict each other in a number of ways, that make it more or less necessary for manufactures to build them over sized. And, yeah, you can also add into that some level of deregulation, or lack of sensible regulation, such that you see stupid things like, “Now that we have better, longer lasting, but just as bright LED lights, we have relaxed regulations on the specific requirements for what sort of lights are needed on a vehicle.”, which has led to idiocies like your brakes, running, backup, and turn signals all being wired into the same set of freaking lights, and all being the same color, actually making them less safe, since a) if something goes wrong, they all stop working, not just the broken one, and b) in same instances it is less obvious what the freaking lights even mean or are doing. I can pretty much guarantee that some part of the “big truck” issue is, “Its easier to meet the standards we are still required to hit by making it stupid big, than if we tried to make it normal sized, and still follow them all.”
I often think one of the biggest issues with law and government in our country is the bloody madness that “revising”, or just bloody systematically reviewing, then fixing, existing law is so utterly broken that you almost inevitably just stack layer, upon layer, upon layer, of BS over top of the prior layers of law and regulation, instead of just fixing the damn rules, so they make sense, leading to a minotaur’s maze of “interpretation”, instead of clear freaking instructions. Its sometimes worse than those instructions you get which where written in German, then translated to Chinese, before coming to the US market, and retranslated from the already broken Chinese version into English. Its not that people are not “looking for” smaller trucks, or want them, its just that the “instructions” given to manufacturers have made it nearly impossible to build anything else but what is on the market. It is, after all, a market, and “normally” manufacturers are not going to build shit people don’t want, if they can profit by building what they do. Not always anyway, and a bigger truck, costs them more to make, so.. logically, if anything, they would be trying to use as little freaking steal, plastic, motor size, etc. as they possible can, to save themselves money, not “over building” the thing, at much higher costs to themselves, then trying to convince people to buy them anyway. Its completely backwards. They would, if they could, be building the cheapest crap they possibly could, and smallest, then trying to convince us, “There is totally nothing wrong with this, and it works just as good as what you owned from the 1940s!”, not the literally complete opposite of that.
An electric dishwasher demonstrably uses less water and less energy to get dishes objectively cleaner than washing them by hand. It should be a criminal offence to make false statements which could lead to more pollution. Other people’s right to live in a clean environment outweighs your right to tell lies.
I don’t use air conditioning ( luckily New York doesn’t have horror story heat [yet]) and I’ve got a bazillion houseplants that help eat up a teeny bit of the CO2. I tend to debunk science deniers online and other than not voting for warming deniers I’m not sure what else I can do
beholder@25: that would also throw the people of Ukraine, Taiwan, and South Korea under the bus.
Kagehi@26: Legislative technical debt. But there may also be ulterior motives there. The mess you describe tilts the playing field to the benefit of a) lawyers themselves and b) deeper-pocketed entities who can afford to hire an army of lawyers. The deeper-pocketed entities like that just fine, and undoubtedly are willing to pay the legislature, itself composed of lawyers, to keep things that way rather than do any tidying up.
bluerizlagirl@27: Less energy? Even than hand-washing in cold water?
Bekenstein Bound
My understanding is that if you factor in things like the energy it takes to clean the water, yes even hand washing in cold water is not as energy efficient, because you use so much more water, and the cleaning of the water is where most of the energy use comes from. And you simply can’t clean as well as a machine that even on it’s eco setting holds the contents at temperature for a while, thus killing lots more microorganisms. I don’t know if anyone has done serious studies on it and honestly can’t be bothered to look right now, but I’ve heard plenty of people say that the number of colds their families got dropped when they got dishwashers.
I don’t really care if I kill the microorganisms, so long as I part them from the dinnerware and send them swirling down the drain. Which surely soapy water and a bit of scrubbing suffices to do?
In any event, I’ve never had the luxury of owning a dishwasher. Or having the energy use, however much smaller it might be, accrue to my electric bill instead of to the city’s. :)
bluerizlagirl@27,
Reference? I looked at one version of this claim and it’s complete crap, considerably over-estimating the amount of water needed for handwashing. It says you need 9 litres to handwash two place-settings. I would use around 4 litres to wash not only the place-settings, but all the equipment used in making the meal – much of which a dishwasher can’t cope with anyway (try putting a saucepan or serving dish with bits of food baked on in a dishwasher).
Here is a list of things you shouldn’t put in a dishwasher – which means that for almost any meal I’d wash up, I’d need to do handwashing as well.
You’ll find beholder doesn’t give a shit about the victims of any imperialism other than that of the USA and its allies – or even acknowledge the existence of such. If the USA and its allies completely disarmed, beholder believes the result would be universal peace.
@34 KG
So the U.S. military has to continue destroying the life support systems of this planet in order to keep killing the enemy before they can kill us. Gotcha.
I don’t believe you’ve given any consideration to the likely outcome of your strategy.
beholder@35,
You’re either just a conscious Putin-supporting fascist, or a complete idiot. Do you really want to pretend that the USA unilaterally disarming would lead to an end to war, or even a diminution in global military spending and military-caused greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental damage? The obvious outcome would be expansionist wars launched by Russia, China, and probably other powerful states. With regard to Russia and China we don’t even have to guess how they would behave, because both are already pursuing expansionist policies, in Ukraine and with regard to Taiwan and the South China Sea respectively. A further predictable result is increased military spending by other states (India, Japan, France, Germany, UK, Australia…) fearing Russian or Chinese aggression, then states fearing those states, and so on. Both disarmament, and avoiding climate catastrophe, require international agreements which the states agreeing to them actually respect.
With regard to Russia at least, we already know Putin will not do so, since he has trashed commitments Russia made at least twice (the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the Russia-Ukraine Treaty of Friendship in 1997) not to invade Ukraine. To take Ukraine as a specific example, if the USA stopped supporting Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion as you propose, that invasion would almost certainly succeed – even if European countries did not follow suit. I suppose your advice to the Ukrainians would be to “lie back and enjoy it”, but the predictable slaughter and repression there would not be the end of the matter. Even if Putin did not promptly invade another victim (Moldova or the Baltic states for example), fascists throughout Europe would be emboldened, the EU would likely collapse and further wars ensue. On the other hand, if Putin can be prevented from profiting from the invasion, that will be a huge setback for global fascism, of which he is the effective leader. Even you can’t have avoided noticing that his most powerful admirers in the USA are Trump and those around him (there are a few useful idiots such as Cornel West, Jill Stein and yourself who claim to be of the left, but they have effectively zero influence). The situation is similar in Germany and France, the most influential European states. Whether you know it or not (I suspect you manage not to), you are Putin’s tool.
beholder @35, I’ll add to #36 that proposing something you must know is not going to happen – the “rapid disarmament of.. the US military” purely to score (as you obviously think) a rhetorical point, is both stupid and cynical.
@ KG
No solutions to anthropogenic global warming allowed. Keep it vague and noncommittal, otherwise someone out there might offend KG. We don’t want that.
beholder@38,
Something that isn’t going to happen isn’t a solution to anything. Are you pretending you don’t know the unilateral rapid disarmament of the US military isn’t going to happen? Because if you do know that – and you do, unless you’re an even more complete fucking numpty than you appear to be – then you know it’s not a “solution to anthropogenic global warming”, hence your only reason for proposing it as such is an attempt to score a cheap rhetorical point – and an abjectly failed attempt, at that.