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Air-conditioned dystopias
(Business Day (South Africa) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Air-conditioned dystopias JAMES FERGUSSON calculates the energy and human costs of a creature comfort that is rapidly turning into a nightmarish technology WILL historians look back at the summer heatwave of 2006 and declare it a turning point in the hearts-and-minds battle against global warming? Much of the northern hemisphere was united in discomfort. At the same time, the tone of public debate seemed to shift. Not many people followed the bishop of London, Richard Chartres, who declared that flying away on holiday was sinful. But few of the energy-consuming machines that dominate life in the west have escaped critical scrutiny.
Except one. There is a piece of 20th-century technology seldom discussed or even noticed because it is practically invisible when working as it should which has played a role almost as big in shaping the modern world as the motor car or the aeroplane. Its contribution to carbon emissions and climate change has been just as disastrous and it is set to have an even bigger effect in the near future. Step forward, please, the humble air conditioning unit.
Everyone knows that the US is easily the biggest per capita consumer of electricity on the planet. Less appreciated is the country's dependence on air conditioning. Americans, representing less than 5% of the world's population, consumed roughly one quarter of all the electricity generated in the world in 2003. Fully a third of that, according to Energy Bulletin, an independent energy information exchange, went towards power for air conditioners. That's 8% of the world's total electricity supply. Meanwhile, air conditioners in American vehicles use 26-million litres of petrol a year, equivalent to the total oil consumption of Indonesia, with a population of 240-million. About a third of European cars now have air conditioning. The number of cars with air conditioning in SA is growing, but there is a way to go before we catch up with the US, where car aircon has been standard equipment for years.
The acknowledged father of air conditioning is Willis Carrier, a farmer's son from Angola, New York, who is said to have come up with the idea while waiting for a train one morning in Pittsburgh. He observed a bank of fog rolling over the lip of the platform and conceived the all-important theory of dew-point control". The patent was granted exactly a century ago. His invention was essentially a refrigerator without the insulated box. A refrigerant gas was compressed until it liquefied, then passed through an expansion valve that caused it to evaporate. The cool air was then distributed by a fan. Carrier's original refrigerant was ammonia. These days, Freon is used, although the underlying principle is unchanged.
Carrier's story reads like an archetype of the American dream: a stirring tale of visionary brilliance and business acumen that leads to success against the odds. Carrier tinkered endlessly with old clocks and sewing machines as a child, and eventually won a mechanical engineering scholarship to Cornell University. His first job was with the Buffalo Forge Company, a manufacturer of heaters and blowers, where he was put in charge of an experimental department. In 1902, at the age of 25, he devised and installed the world's first air conditioner for the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company in Brooklyn. The firm had been unable to print reliable colours because of the effects of heat and humidity on paper and ink. Carrier eventually left Buffalo and set up on his own.
His first clients were mostly commercial. Landmark installations that did much to bring air conditioning to the attention of the public included Madison Square Gardens and the US Senate, along with cinemas, department stores and offices. The depression and the Second World War were setbacks. It was not until the 1950s that the technology was introduced into houses. The effect of air conditioning on worker productivity had already been demonstrated before the war; now it was marketed as a form of empowerment at home. Americans demanded it in their millions. What had been considered a luxury soon became one of the must-haves of modern life. Weatherlessness" was perceived as a step towards a technology-driven utopia.
Because of the weight and size of the early units, the final frontier for air conditioning was the car. As with the early car phones in the 1980s, the first air-conditioned vehicles carried immense social status. In Texas in the 1950s, some people drove around with their windows shut tight in 37C heat just to fool their neighbours.
Since the 1950s, air conditioning has been partly responsible for the economic development of America's sunbelt, migration towards which continues today. Never mind the cowboys: aircon was how the south was won. The same is true of other parts of the world. The financial centres of Japan, the capitals of the Asian tiger economies, the hubs of the Gulf such as Dubai all would be almost unthinkable without temperature control. So too would the software that links and underpins them, since computer technology does not function well in hot and humid conditions. Without air conditioning, the information superhighway would buckle in the heat. In South America, Spain and elsewhere in southern Europe, air conditioning has killed the midday siesta. And the war on terror depends on it. Hi-tech, precision weaponry requires low and stable temperatures for its manufacture.
A more visible legacy of air conditioning is the clusters of sealed-window, high-rise offices that dominate our skylines. It's a dark thought, but it took the force of two (air-conditioned) airliners to open the windows of the World Trade Center in 2001. One of the forerunners of the World Trade Center was the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin, built by the futuristic architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1936. The building's most notable feature is its almost complete lack of windows, and so its total reliance on air conditioning. Not everyone agreed with the space-cooling revolution that this building symbolised. Its critics included HL Mencken, Sinclair Lewis and JK Galbraith. Henry Miller visited the new Johnson buildingin 1940; an account of his journey, entitled The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, was published in 1945. This place is flawless deathlike," he wrote. Man has no chance to create once inside this mausoleum. Down with Frank Lloyd Wright!" This wrath, according to Marsha E Ackerman, author of Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air Conditioning, was focused on the perceived complacency of a surging middle class full of Babbits who smugly added foolish comforts to their way of life". Today, 83% of US households contain one or more air-conditioning units and the Carrier Corporation employs 45000 people in 172 countries.
The one thing that air conditioning's early detractors didn't mention, but might have, was the cost to the environment. Despite all the improvements since Carrier's day, air conditioning remains hopelessly inefficient. In a typical unit, as much as 40% of the energy used is lost in the form of heat. A humming locust plague of air conditioning plants, blasting out hot air in urban backyards and on the roofs of big buildings, are significant local contributors to warming, and one reason that many cities are often several degrees hotter than their environs. Air conditioning, in the words of an environmentalist, is the SUV of the electricity world. And it contributes to global as well as local warming according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, 1545kg of carbon dioxide is emitted each year to cool the average American home, about two thirds of the annual emissions from an average British car.
And what of the emerging economies in the east particularly the surging middle classes" of Asia and the far east, whose potential numbers dwarf the air conditioner users of the US? In China, the pattern set in 1950s America is repeating itself. Exactly the same social issues of status, worker productivity and domestic comfort apply. The Chinese have worked hard for the trappings of western affluence. Just as in the US half a century ago, the environment counts for little in the face of such aspiration. There are already more than 100-million residential air-conditioners in China, triple the number of five years ago. Sales are slower this year than last, but are still expected to reach a staggering 27-million units. According to figures published in the People's Daily, air-conditioning already accounts for 15% of national power consumption annually. In summer, that figure jumps to 40%.
Like Californians, the Chinese have grown used to seasonal electricity shortages as demand exceeds supply, especially in Shanghai, where there are regular government decrees obliging shopping malls, offices and hotels to set their thermostats no lower than 26C. Two thirds of China's electricity generation is still coal-fired. Every ten days, it is said, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China big enough to serve all the households in Dallas. China uses more coal than the US, the EU and Japan combined, and is home to five of the 10 most polluted cities in the world and partly because the Chinese want their homes to be as cool and comfortable as those of the Americans.
The local market leader in air conditioner manufacturing is the Haier Corporation, whose factories cover 1km in the coastal city of Qingdao, south of Beijing. Haier's sales have grown by an average of 70% every year over the past two decades, and are now worth around $10bn a year. Haier boss Zhang Ruimin was recently rated by Fortune magazine as one of the most powerful businessmen outside America. He is lionised at home, too. Ruimin is or he seems to perceive himself as one of the new masters of the universe. His corporate literature sounds crazed: Haier should be like the sea," it reads, because the sea can accept all the rivers on earth, big and small, coming all the way to empty into it. Haier is the sea." But progress is seldom turned back. The best attribute of air conditioning is its addiction," Salil Kapoor, head of marketing in India for South Korean company LG Electronics, the world's largest manufacturer of air conditioners, says. It's a romance." Yet addictions can be broken; romance does not always last. Mankind not only survived for millennia without Carrier's invention, but developed all sorts of effective strategies for dealing with the conditions it was designed to beat. Mesopotamian despots built double-walled palaces and packed the cavities with imported ice. The street plan of medieval Korcula, a Venetian town on an island off the Dalmatian coast, follows a unique fishbone pattern that maximises shade. To this day, certain Pashtuns in northern Afghanistan spend the hottest hours of the day on a raised, shaded platform hung about with palm fronds that are periodically dipped in a stream a technique known as evaporative cooling that was also widely practised in 18th-century France. Even the British rulers of imperial India deployed high ceilings and enough punka-wallahs to prevent their wing-collars from wilting. Air conditioning, in other words, is not the only means we have of cooling ourselves down.
In the meantime, the technological utopia once envisioned for America by Carrier is in danger of becoming all the world's dystopia. Air conditioning sits at the centre of what physicists call a positive feedback loop", by which they mean that the hotter it gets, the more inclined people are to turn up the dial, with the result that it gets hotter still. In the understated words of the Energy Bulletin: Positive feedback loops are a form of amplification, which when left uncontrolled, lead to a circumstance called saturation. This result is normally an undesirable outcome." Just how undesirable was hinted at in summer, when high temperatures in California created such a demand for power that the state was forced to ration it in a series of rolling blackouts." The same thing happened in Texas and even, briefly, in London. Demand for electricity in California, the world's sixth largest economy, has grown by 6% a year for the past five years, according to utility company Pacific Gas and Electric, who partly blamed the blackouts on the large number of digital and internet companies with headquarters in the state, and the levels of air conditioning that these businesses require.
In Long Beach in early August, Tony Blair and Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California, met to discuss climate change. They agreed to share experiences" to find new solutions" and to work to educate the public on the need for aggressive action to address climate change". The roundtable of businessmen at which they sat was, naturally, bathed in conditioned air. Nobody is seriously proposing bringing back the punka-wallahs, but it is time that air conditioning was more publicly recognised as one of those technologies that, while liberating us, increasingly threatens us too.
's book, The Vitamin Murders, will be published by Portobello Books in 2007.
Copyright 2006 Times Media Ltd.. Source: Financial Times Information Limited - Europe Intelligence Wire.
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