We're Ready to Deal

Someone named "Stan Cox" wrote a little piece in yesterday's Washington Post titled "In the heat wave, the case against air conditioning." Mr. Cox, moved by love for his fellow man, moral scruple respecting Mother Gaea, and the fact that he has a book to sell ($16.47, and not available in an environmentally friendly Kindle edition) explains:

Washington didn't grind to a sweaty halt last week under triple-digit temperatures. People didn't even slow down. Instead, the three-day, 100-plus-degree, record-shattering heat wave prompted Washingtonians to crank up their favorite humidity-reducing, electricity-bill-busting, fluorocarbon-filled appliance: the air conditioner.

This isn't smart. In a country that's among the world's highest greenhouse-gas emitters, air conditioning is one of the worst power-guzzlers. The energy required to air-condition American homes and retail spaces has doubled since the early 1990s. Turning buildings into refrigerators burns fossil fuels, which emits greenhouse gases, which raises global temperatures, which creates a need for -- you guessed it -- more air-conditioning.

A.C.'s obvious public-health benefits during severe heat waves do not justify its lavish use in everyday life for months on end. Less than half a century ago, America thrived with only the spottiest use of air conditioning. It could again.

He goes on to describe his Utopian vision of the future without A/C.

(In the interest of full disclosure, your humble and obedient servant grew up on a farm in a house without air conditioning, and attended grammar school in a similarly unsullied building. Mr. Cox sounds rather like one of those fellows who gets all misty-eyed and poetic respecting the virtues of hard work on the family farm, who has himself never spent a mercilessly hot Summer day shoveling chicken shit.)

But we're ready to deal, and we'll make a deal with both Mr. Cox and the Environmental Magisterium: we agree to turn off our air conditioning in the Summer, and to wear sweaters in the Winter, and to make a $100,000 contribution to the organization of alGore's choice, the day after the Congress of the United States prohibits air conditioning in the Capitol, all Congressional offices, and all automobiles used by members of Congress. Put another way, we'll believe it's a crisis as soon as the folks telling us that it's a crisis themselves start to behave as if it actually were a crisis.