An air conditioner based guide to future net zero politics

Government

Dec 10

5 Aug 2022

"What are the most important technologies in recent history?"

Whenever this question is asked, public answers tend to be focused on the core emerging tech: AI, blockchain, the internet, etc.

Ill admit, the most transformative technological inventions that are coming to mind for me from the last 1-2 centuries are the mass manufactured tin can, the electric motor, and the air conditioner. But the air conditioner stands out as a way of reshaping humanity's relationship to temperature, and by extension, to the concept of what is liveable and under what conditions.

Climate change and air conditioning are set to go head to head in the next century, and the capacity to deploy and improve air conditioning will be increasingly a life or death question.

In the short term though, Spain has recently made the unique move of mandating that public spaces with air conditioners set them no lower than 81f / 27.2c.

Why?

To reduce the public consumption pressure on energy resources to further detach the Spanish energy economy from Russia.

Spain is joined here by a large cavalcade of approaches to reducing public energy consumption - from Greece saying the Germans should winter there instead of at home; reduction's in public fountain usage, public lighting, public and governmental buildings shutting off hot water, etc.

A larger european experiment with the space between discomfort and danger in hot and cold weather with the need for energy independence. But the air conditioner side should catch more attention, as the capacity to pursue mandated changes to indoor temperature poses a set of further considerations.

Mass temperature control positions societies to bear greater climate risk by avoiding the feedback loop of increasing temperature and relocation. The place gets hotter, you relocate or you change further design of your society. For the last century, air conditioning has been the pre-eminent technological fix for a growing climate concern. But air conditioning is unequally distributed, as well as models of air conditioning existing far beyond the transatlantic electric air conditioner.

The ability to have consistently good sleep, the ability to reduce adjacent electricity and water costs by avoiding sweating, the ability to more easily schedule the day, the ability to avoid additional purchases of other equipment and clothing to better adjust to the temperature variation. Air conditioning is not one thing, its the entirety of our relationship to our everyday and expected everyday life in our often hidden relationship to temperature.

Where does this leave us?

With the next generation of net zero politics, front and centre.

For one, the distribution of innovation and access to innovation for air conditioners shapes a viable geography of settling and moving as the world gets hotter. Air conditioning reframes the global distribution of temperature risk.

For another, as temperature variation gets more volatile, air conditioners will be more consistently relied on to improve quality of life - which adds a more extreme energy burden. Who can and cannot support temperature control independence relative to their energy independence?

For another, the right to a liveable indoor temperature will become a clearer mark of the most basic, standard of living based inequality. As the temperature range beyond the 'liveability' question becomes about effective productive and work management, even community management. A whole generation in the transatlantic which will have to look to lessons from LATAM, south east Asia, and sub-saharan Africa on how to adjust to patterns of life in hotter climates.

For yet another, this risks a further entrenchment of misunderstanding between those at risk from temperature variation and those insulated (literally and metaphorically) from such risks through reliable energy access as well as reliable access to indoor cooling technology. Its hard to feel solidarity when it's too hot to think, too hot to work. Policy and politics without attention to the basic quality of life conditions of future work, future engagement in the political system, will lead to further internal struggles within the progressive movement.

Social innovation on living with hotter weather with unreliable cooling technology is a basic, human experience and lived experience based network waiting to be assembled. What are the basic strategies to cool down, what are the basic strategies to warm up. Having lived in Texas, I can be direct - strategies for cooling down in hot and humid environments where air conditioning is not nearby is always front of mind, and is always an existential question.

But as with all net zero politics, this splits the attention between two areas - the minimal survivable range of temperature and the conditions of equitable access to a higher standard of living associated temperature. With the latter, attention is fixed on air conditioning - but the geopolitical and energy politics questions of the air conditioner problem frame inequality at the local to the global level.

Its time for a clearer politics of air conditioners, with pressure towards the social and technological innovation which needs to emerge.

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