Are we heading to air-conditioned Hell? Classic 2012 interviews with Stan Cox author of “Losing Our Cool”. Dr. Guus Velders from Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency on AC. Dr. Michael Sivak, University of Michigan on the global growth of air-conditioning.
This week we’re looking at air-conditioning. Are we heading into artificially cooled caves as the outdoors becomes unbearably hot? In some places, anyone who can has already abandoned the summer streets, traveling between air conditioned rooms in air conditioned cars. If the grid fails, or electricity becomes too much, what then? And all the while, the gases used to cool your food in ships and trucks, in a billion refrigerators and hundreds of millions of air conditioners for homes, malls, offices and factories, is escaping into the upper atmosphere, like a blanket warming the world.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
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Stage one: the Earth gets hotter and hotter due to growing greenhouse gas emissions. Stage two: humans cool themselves artificially with machines. Stage Three: air conditioning makes the world even hotter, until we run out of fossil fuels to run the machines, or extinction takes us down.
It’s an obvious progression, another adaptation to what we’ve done. I used to count air-conditioning as a minor factor, another irritant to living systems. Now I’ve learned it’s a major vector, a force that could help tip us into runaway climate change.
Everybody knows air-conditioners suck up lots of energy, most of it powered by coal. We’ve heard rumors a billion people in Asia are buying them. I’ve known for 20 years the refrigerants are super global warming gases – but those tiny amounts hiding in the back of our refrigerators and air-conditioners can’t amount to all that much…
Wait until you hear the truth about air-conditioning. We’ve got three powerful interviews.
Stan Cox is author of the best guide, a book called “Losing Our Cool”. His article in the Guardian newspaper gives us the global picture.
Dr. Guus Velders was with Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, and he advises world bodies on ozone depletion and climate change. Now he’s with Utrecht University.
Dr. Michael Sivak from the University of Michigan wrote the best studies on the global growth of air-conditioning.
For links and more on our guests, check out the original show blog.
In the movie sci fi movie “Brazil” by Terry Gilliam, every home and indoor space is climate controlled by machines. Otherwise, who could stand what is lurking outdoors? We may be there already. As our first guest Stan Cox told us, it took a generation for Americans to install 100 million air-conditioners. Fifty million were sold in China in 2010 alone. Wait until you hear what is happening in India.
Remember, in our current rush to air-condition everywhere, Dr. Gus Velders estimates that by 2050, the burst of energy use combined with super warming gases in the refrigerants, could add up to 20% of our current total emissions. It doesn’t take much to tip a climate into a new hothouse age. Maybe that will do it.
As we feel the rumble of the on-coming climate train, I’m not going to count on prayer alone. Activism and action can preserve a livable world.
I’m Alex Smith. You can reach me through the contact form on this web stie. I always appreciate your feed-back, tips, and ideas.
Radio Ecoshock isn’t a music show, even though good sound often sustains me. It was over 100 degrees F. in New York City AND polluted from wildfire smoke – a genuine “hot and polluted episode”. (July 2025) For folks sweltering through the heat from USA through Scandinavia to Iran, China and Japan: here is my AI-assisted song “Hot and Polluted Episodes”.
Listen to or download the show theme song “Hot and Polluted” (3 min)