Don't Sweat It

Air-conditioning has long been termed a mere luxury and evidence suggests that most people prefer sweating to shivering. But both weather extremes can have serious repercussions. Last year, Engber explained why we shouldn?t feel guilty for kicking up the AC. His original article is printed below:

Some people have a thermal machismo when it comes to enduring a heat wave, but they don't understand that air conditioning is more than a creature comfort.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

There's a scam going around this summer, one that takes advantage of the record heat. An unsolicited phone call or text message offers the promise of federal assistance with soaring electricity bills: Just hand over your Social Security number and a few other bits of personal data, and you'll receive up to $1,000 toward the cost of your air conditioning. What makes this phishing scheme so effective?and so especially galling?is the fact that the home subsidies it purports to offer aren't already in place.

Every year, the government sets aside billions of dollars to help low-income families pay for home heating and cooling. But ever since that program was launched around 30 years ago, it's been clear that not all temperatures are granted equal protection under the law. Nine-tenths of the low-income home energy budget is spent during the winter months, says Mark Wolfe of the National Energy Assistance Directors' Association. In other words, if you're poor and shivering, help is on the way. If you're poor and sweaty, you'll have to suck it up.

This anti-cooling bias doesn't begin or end in Washington, D.C. Eighty-seven percent of American homes now have air conditioners, up from 68 percent in 1993, and yet a backlash against A/C appears to be on high. In June, the New York Times reported on the rapid spread of the appliance in the developing world, and the climate crisis that might result. A related piece, by the former head of the United Nations ozone program, compared air conditioning to the consumption of fatty foods?a dangerous luxury that makes us soft both in spirit and in flesh. Others have blamed A/C for the rise in obesity rates, a claim for which there's no good evidence, but never mind: The idea that America's various addictions might be linked together, that overeating and overspending and overcooling could all be part of the same disfiguring condition of modernity, is simply too delicious for some people to ignore.

A certain class of Americans?let's call them the brrr-geoisie?has come to see the air conditioner as a stand-in for everything that's wrong with the country and the world. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, caf?s now throw open their windows in the dead of summer. They won't succumb to a culture of gas-guzzling SUVs and soda-swilling layabouts! They'll give us a place to endure the heat, to suffer the heat, to pretend to enjoy the heat, all while we sit in sweaty judgment of our neighbors. I'm working in one of these fresh-air establishments right now, my neck damp, and I'm trying to imagine the alternate universe where this place would apply the same logic in January, and shut down its furnace so we all could work as God intended. But for the brrr-geoisie, the two extremes of temperature reside in different moral categories. If one end of the thermostat corresponds to a basic human need?for warmth on a winter night?the other reveals a shameful self-indulgence. Heat is good, cool is evil. What's behind this double standard? Why can't we learn to stop worrying and love the air conditioner?

The case against cooling, like certain other pillars of hipster sanctimony, stands on a foundation of half-formed ideas and intuitions. Opponents cite a mishmash of concerns that begin with global warming and extend to worries over personal health, moral laxity, and some ambiguous notion of what it means to live in harmony with the natural world. And running through them all is the strange and puritanical politics of human comfort.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/air_conditioning_haters_it_s_not_as_bad_for_the_environment_as_heating_.html

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