Air conditioning
During this last month or so when it has been, give or take, a million degrees everywhere, twice we’ve been in homes without air conditioning. Both homes did have fans and both homes were in areas of the country that don’t usually get temperatures in the million-degree range, but of course these are different times.
And at both homes, I’ll readily admit, we were really, really warm.
That is, we were no longer acclimated. Air conditioning has become such an integral part of our lives, so basic to the way we go about everything, that confronting a world without AC was a harsh reminder of the way things used to be.
Living in the South, as we do, had made air conditioning not just a godsend but essential. It had created an artificial utopia, but it also has not prepared us for the more natural world of occasionally debilitating ambient heat.
Before air conditioning, while growing up in an apartment in the Bronx, NY, in the summertime we’d move a mattress or two onto the fire escape — not to escape a fire but because sleeping outside was cooler at night. When we got our first window AC unit, sometime in the ’50s, it went in our living room and we moved all the mattresses there so the entire family could sleep in the blessed coolness or the new whirring marvel.
When it was hot, we used fans, circulating the warm air but making us feel better nevertheless. When it was really hot, we’d go to the movies because the movie theaters were the first places in our neighborhood to get air conditioning. To this day, I associate the smell of popcorn with the rush of cooled air.
We no longer have to move mattresses because air conditioning not only transformed our lives. It changed architecture, migration patterns, politics, the economy. It fundamentally changed society and in fact, a good argument can be made that AC has transformed all our lives as much or more than any other invention of the last 75 years. It’s clearly up there with the internet and the smartphone and the jet airliner.
Before the AC era, office buildings featured high ceilings, openable windows, cross-ventilation and even central courtyards to promote natural cooling. The advent of air conditioning allowed for the modernist transformation to "glass box" skyscrapers with sealed facades, eliminating the need for natural ventilation.
Remember when people would all be outside in the evening, escaping the heat of their houses and apartments? With the advent of air conditioning, particularly in the South, traditional residential features like porches and shaded walkways declined. That has led to less socializing, less neighborliness. No more sitting on the front porch chit-chatting with neighbors. As we retreated indoors to climate-controlled comfort, there were fewer neighborhood block parties and children’s play shifted from streets and parks to air-conditioned homes.
By making the South and the desert Southwest more habitable year-round, air conditioning fueled the growth of the Sun Belt and fundamentally changed America demographics and thus its politics. From 1950 to 2000, the Gulf Coast’s population surged from 500,000 to 20 million, driven by AC-enabled comfort. By 1966, Texas had become the first state with more than 50 percent of homes with AC, and in 60 years its population has more than tripled and it is now the second most populous state in the nation—and has the second most representatives in Congress.
More and more retirees and younger people, too, were attracted to now more-livable Florida, Arizona and the Carolinas. If blacks moving north in the early parts of the 20th century was the Great Migration, midwestern and northeastern whites moving south in the second half of the 20th century was the second great migration.
Industries also relocated to the South and Southwest, capitalizing on AC-driven productivity gains and lower operational costs, leaving behind what we now call the rust belt, emptying out what had been thriving towns in the Midwest and Northeast. AC also facilitated low-density suburban development, reducing the need for compact, shade-oriented urban planning.
While air conditioning enabled Sun Belt prosperity, modernist architecture and indoor-centric lifestyles, there have been downsides, of course. AC accounts for 12 percent of U.S. home energy use. As the planet gets hotter, it is estimated global cooling demand could double by 2050, contributing to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
Our friends without AC weren’t trying to make an environmental statement. They were just comfortable the way they were. And while we were pretty hot in their non-air-conditioned homes, those who live there all the time, who had acclimated themselves to a world without AC, seemed to be doing just fine.