Air conditioned comfort cuts you off from the world

Air Head is an interesting article contrasting different responses to air conditioning, and one persons struggles with moral issues on energy use and modern comfort. The writer lives in New York, and received an offer from his in-laws (who live in Texas) for the money to buy an air conditioner. His response? He doesn't want it, even if it's free.

There's the moral type issue, namely air conditioners are a large energy cost which directly contributes to global warming. But, he says, that wasn't the real reason he's turning it down, the real reason is much more personal.

As he puts it: I grew up on the shores of Connecticut. To me, summer has always been a time of heat, the sun baking the paint on the bottom of old wood dinghies, small waves breaking, blackberry ice cream dripping down your forearm, and some lucky kid five years your senior fooling around with a kit-built remote control car.

In other words, living with heat is part of living. It's part of the cycle of life, it's one of the seasons of the year, and our bodies evolved over kerjillions of years to be able to handle this climactic condition.

And then, extrapolating on the idea, he goes on to say: Shutting out summer with an air conditioner is like ripping the second hand off life's mortal clock. .... hmm ...

I think this is a widespread part of modern society, this separation from nature. Modern cities have very little naturalness to them, and the mainstream media presents the gleaming metropolis as if it were the absolutest of sheer beauty, and marvelous beyond dreams. But, I ask you, where are the trees, the birds, snakes, field mice, and more? The typical city has none of these things, but aren't they part of natural life?

Air conditioning is an insidious comfort. You turn it on, and suddenly you don't want to leave it, and you begin to believe life is impossible without it. That idea traps you within the bubbles of air conditioning, keeping you from enjoying the natural world. And, yes, I'm speaking from personal experience of spending lots of time in air conditioned buildings.

There's one idea in this guys article I strongly disagree with. Living in Texas without air conditioning is probably impossible. Anyone who grew up there grew up with air conditioning, as sure as they grew up with refrigerators and other modern conveniences. In Texas, you grow up with AC the way you grow up with religion.

While I don't doubt that Texas has zillions of air conditioners, and that modern Texans probably feel that way about these gizmos, this is hardly the traditional way of life in Texas with hundreds of years behind it. Air conditioning is probably less than 100 years old, meaning this particular gizmo is barely an infant in terms of human history. Humans have been dealing with the heat for millenia, and we modern humans are ignoring the wisdom of those millenia of our ancestors, wisdom we could be using to avoid the global warming crisis.

In Texas I'm sure the ancestors used adobe or similar building techniques. While a modern person might not want to live in a plaster house, the main attribute of adobe is extreme insulation. There are many ways to achieve extreme insulation, and modern materials techniques have made it so we can get glass windows with any insulation factor you desire. It's possible to build a house, using modern techniques, with the same insulating capability of an adobe house, and with as many windows as you want.

Adobe buildings stay cool inside, even during the heat of the day. Without air conditioning.

Why aren't we doing that? Why are we ignoring the wisdom our ancestors brought us?

An inconvenient comparison of two homes

Al Gore, the big time promotor of environmental awareness and alarming people of global warming... you'd think he'd be living in a super green house and driving a super green car, right? One would hope he'd put his money where his mouth is.

Al Gore's home is a typical mansion of the rich elite in all its energy wasting glory.

George W. Bush's home in Crawford Texas is the epitome of off-the-grid living with every sort of sustainable energy gizmo you could think of.

If only GW would do for the country what he does for himself in his own home.

UPDATE (April 14, 2007) In Ecotality Gets Drudged When Gore Goes Green it's noted that Al Gore has applied for zoning permission to install solar panels on his house.

Article Reference: 

An Inconvenient Truth

Ecotality Gets Drudged When Gore Goes Green

Keeping cool without air conditioning

Earlier I'd written about the issue of keeping cool without having to use an air conditioner. Our society has thousands of years of experience of living without the modern technology and air conditioners, so why do we today need this? Is there anything we can learn from our ancestors?

Air Conditioning: "We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable": explains some of the cost involved with over use of air conditioning. It costs a lot of power, and the power only contributes to global warming, making the heat worse, which then just makes people want to crank up the air conditioners.

Other air conditioning alternatives and Make your own air conditioner: cover a couple alternatives to air conditioners. These are low-tech methods made by individuals. They have a cooler full of ice water, submerge a pump in the water, and use the pump to send the cold water through some coils. The coils are intertwined into a fan. As the fan blows air over the coils the air cools etc.

How much ice would I have to store up in the winter in order to air condition my house all summer? is an interesting HowStuffWorks.com question along those lines. The idea is, during the winter there's snow, and what if you stored that snow and used it for cooling during the summer.

Before you scoff and say the snow would melt before summer ... do you realize that's exactly what an "ice house" is? Our ancestors would dig a hole in the ground and store snow/ice there. They called it an "ice house".

It shows a possible method to avoid having an air conditioner, so long as you have a significant amount of snow in the winter. It would be the same method as "make your own air conditioner" but on a larger scale.

The HowStuffWorks people tried to answer how much snow is required to be collected. But I think their calculations are faulty. Read it carefully and the base number is the BTU rating of the air conditioner in a typical house. The BTU rating of a gadget like that is going to be the peak capacity of the unit, not its actual usage. You aren't going to have the air conditioner cranked to the max for 12 hours a day all year long. Instead the actual usage in the air conditioner is going to vary during the day.

In any case this seems somewhat achievable to collect enough snow to make a cube 25 feet on a side. Interestingly the ice houses I've seen in colonial era houses were similar size.

While an individual might get tired thinking of shoveling 900,000 pounds of snow, don't most people in heavily snowed places own snow blowers? In other words technology can come to the rescue and some form of snow blower could be used to move snow into a modern day ice house.

Collecting that much snow would also answer this question: What about keeping warm in the winter?

But, really, this solution only helps for places that get a lot of snow in the winter, and are hot in the summer. There are a lot of places which either don't get very hot in the summer, or don't get a lot of snow in the winter. Georgia for example gets rather hot, but gets no snow, and therefore people there wouldn't be able to build an ice house for summertime cooling.

Air Conditioning: "We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable"

In The deluded world of air conditioning William Saletan offers a very interesting perspective. "We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable".

When you air condition a building you're taking heat that's inside the building and moving it outside. That's what an air conditioner is, a heat pump. The fluids that go through an air conditioning system? They're the medium through which heat is exchanged, or rather pumped, from one place to another.

And, when we pump heat outdoors that costs energy. The energy used comes from somewhere, most likely through burning natural gas. So when we run an air conditioner and pump energy outside, that natural gas that's burned to make the electricity emits carbon into the atmosphere, which then in turn increases the greenhouse and global warming effect.

Air conditioners hasten global warming. So it's a fools journey to run an air conditioner because when you do it's just tightening a noose around your neck. Unfortunately the tightening of that noose is happening slowly enough that it's hard to connect the air conditioner with the global warming.

And, it's not just air conditioners. It's the whole range of gadgets that use electricity or gasoline. Want to clean up the fallen leaves in your yard? Are you going to get out a rake, or use a leaf blower? Want to go grocery shopping? Are you going to drive a Hummer or a Geo Metro or a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (NEV) or a bicycle? When your teenager turns 16 do they get a car immediately? Do you know what a "phantom electrical load" is?

In this hot summer air conditioning is a, er, hot topic. There are some alternatives to consider. But something I wonder about is, just how the heck did our ancestors survive without air conditioners?

Why do we have to use air conditioners when there are thousands of years of human experience that could show us how to live without air conditioning in the first place?

For example, there are herbal ways to cool down. Ways that do not require refridgeration or air conditioning.

In the Middle East Sekanjabin (?sp?) is a traditional drink. It's main active ingredients are mint and sugar. Both are known to herbalists as cooling substances that, when ingested, will act to cool the body.

How can you prove this to yourself? Let me offer a simple test from Healing with the Herbs of Life. First take a sprig of fresh mint, crush it up, and pop it in your mouth. Doesn't your mouth feel cool? Take a breath in and out. Cool?

Now take some cinnamon, just a dab, and put it in your mouth. Hot?

Mint is a cooling herb, while cinnamon is a heating herb. Healing with the Herbs of Life goes into this in extensive detail from the perspective of Chinese Medicine. But the concepts are known to herbalists of all societies.

Another example of how the thousands of years of human experience can show us how to cool our living quarters without air conditioning. A few years ago I visited some friends who own some land in the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was mid-summer, on a hot day. On their land is an old one-room schoolhouse that sits out in the direct sun all day long. However, the inside of that schoolhouse remains cool all day long. How? Thick walls. Similarly in California there are many old buildings left from the Spanish. These are "adobe" buildings and the main feature is the thick walls.

Thick walls mean good insulation. You might think insulation only helps keep heat inside. Actually what insulation does is impede the flow of heat. So the heat outside the building has a harder time getting inside the better the insulation.

Another alternative to air conditioning is offered by the plant kingdom. Plant trees around your house, trees that are large enough to shade the roof. The trees will keep the heat from hitting your house in the first place. If you live in a place that that gets real cold in the winter, then you want trees that shed their leaves in the fall. That way in the winter the branches are bare and the sun will reach your house to provide some heat.

Reference: The Deluded World of Air Conditioning

It's hot ... here's how to cool off w/o using lots of energy

We're having a heck of a heat wave this summer. I live in the SF Bay Area and the temperatures are moderated a bit by the ocean. But yesterday it was over 100 where I live, which is an outrageous temperature. I know, I know, 100 isn't so outrageous in other parts of the U.S. but in the SF Bay Area our climate is highly moderated by the ocean. Usually severe winter or summer weather is but a rumor we hear about from friends in other parts of the country.

And I was reading that England is also seeing 100 degree weather. That they were expected to set an all time high temperature. And that it's the second time in the last three years that England is recording an all time high temperature.

Anybody doubt about Global Warming?

Anyway ... this is supposed to be about keeping cool. One reason I wanted to live in the SF Bay Area is the climate. I read in a "Places Rated" book that here in the Bay Area we have a low percentage of air conditioners installed in houses. Obviously that's climate related, and any place that doesn't have the people using air conditioning has got to be relatively cool in the summer.

And, indeed, that's what we have. Usually we have moderate temperatures in the summer with only a few days where we wish we had air conditioners.

Here's a few ideas I've collected about keeping cool without using a lot of power. Air conditioners use a lot of power, and if you want to live sustainably it's worth considering other ways of keeping cool without using air conditioning.

Attic fans work to exhaust hot air from your attic. The attic is like global warming on a miniature scale. Your roof is probably black color and is probably exposed to the sun, and therefore absorbs heat that's transmitted into the attic. The attic then sends that heat into the house. But an attic fan turns on when the temperature is high, draws the air out of the attic, reducing that effect.

Keep the windows open at night when it's cool, use fans to draw air into the house at night, and then shut the windows during the day. The idea is to capture cool air and keep it as long as you can during the day.

wiki how has some tips on keeping cool

For example .. aim a fan so it blows over the top of a bucket of ice. This will work better when the humidity is low. It's a similar idea to the swamp coolers they use in the desert.

Take a cool shower .. cover yourself with a cool cloth .. wear socks that have been soaked in cool water ..

The general idea is to use evaporative cooling.