The Daily - How Air-Conditioning Conquered America

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Air-conditioning has become both our answer to a warming planet and a major obstacle to actually confronting it.Emily Badger, who covers cities and urban policy for The Times, explains the increasingly dangerous paradox of trying to control the temperature.Guest: Emily Badger, who covers cities and urban policy for The New York Times.Background reading: From 2017: How air-conditioning conquered America.Air-conditioning use will surge in a warming world, the U.N. has warned.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. Today, the story of how air conditioning has become both our answer to a warming planet and a major obstacle to actually confronting it. My colleague, Emily Badger, on the increasingly dangerous paradox of trying to control the temperature. It's Friday, August 16th. Emily, I want to start with a very personal question for you.

What is your relationship to air conditioning? So at this exact moment, I am sitting in no air conditioning, and it is kind of uncomfortable. And I've turned it off because it's loud and it's not very conducive to recording a podcast. I didn't mean right now. I meant in the larger arc of your life. But thank you for turning it off for the purposes of this episode. So I grew up in Chicago in this brick three-flat apartment building, this very classic Chicago architecture,

you know, built in the early 1900s, and it didn't have air conditioning. So I didn't have air conditioning growing up. Hardly anybody I knew had air conditioning growing up because we all lived in buildings like this. Not even window units, just didn't happen. Nope, we didn't even have a window unit in my family. And it wasn't that big of a deal in retrospect.

We had in this apartment these big open windows that you could open and you generate a cross breeze through them and there's this kind of lovely breeze that comes off of Lake Michigan in the summer. And when it gets really, really hot, you take a cold shower at night before you get in bed. You eat a lot of ice cream. I can't even remember if we had air conditioning

in the schools that I went to. But it just wasn't something that I thought very much about or really even experienced very much. Right. You didn't miss it. You didn't even know it could be. Yeah, exactly. And then the first job that I got out of college, I moved to Orlando. And totally different environment. I mean, living in Florida is the story of sort of moving from one air-conditioned box into another.

You're in your air-conditioned apartment, you get in your air-conditioned car, you don't walk anywhere, you drive everywhere you go. You drive to your air-conditioned office, you go to air-conditioned bars, and it's really, really integral to life there in a way that was very foreign to me as someone growing up in the North. So you went from a dearth of air conditioning to suddenly being saturated by it. And was that a happy development? You know, I don't think that I really gave it that much thought. I mean, living in Orlando

surrounded by air conditioning, it's just sort of, that's the air that you breathe. That's the way everyone lives. And I think this is probably true for lots of people. We don't really give it a lot of thought. It's just sort of a background part of our environment. But as I have written for years now about urban policy and cities and how we live and how we develop cities, it's sort of become increasingly clear to me that air conditioning is this incredibly important thing that is shaping everything around us. It's shaping where Americans live, where they choose to move to, it shapes how our houses look, it shapes what our skylines look like.

It's responsible for saving lives and heat waves. In many ways, it's really improved our quality of life. But it's increasingly clear to us that there are some downsides to this. And one of those downsides is that while we're all sitting in our air-conditioned homes and offices and cars, and we've set the thermostat to exactly 72 degrees, we're becoming increasingly detached

from what's happening in the environment outside. It is a lot easier to ignore that it's a hundred degrees outside when you're sitting inside air conditioning. And in some ways, I think, you know, we have forgotten how to live with heat. We have forgotten how to live with the climate as it existed before air conditioning. And, you know, having forgotten that is probably going to cause some problems for us going forward. Hmm. Well, Emily, what did the American landscape look like when people did have to contend with the heat in the days before air conditioning? So I think about two big things in particular.

One is that the buildings that we spend time in looked different. We designed houses and other kinds of buildings in ways that were really sort of thoughtfully trying to contend with the temperature outside. And so you've got these buildings in the southwest in the United States that have these thick adobe walls that do a really good job of keeping the sun and its heat out. You've got these cottages and bungalows in the southeast that are raised up off the ground so that they're not kind of receiving the heat that's absorbed by the earth. They've got big windows. They're thinking a lot about cross ventilation.

They've got high ceilings so that as heat rises inside your home, you're not marinating in it while you're sitting in your living room. They've got front porches where people sit at the end of the day in order to try to cool off. And then you've got the building like the one I grew up in in Chicago, which I mentioned, these sort of thick brick masonry buildings, which are also designed in a way that is making it possible for me to grow up in the 1980s and 90s and be okay with the fact that I don't have air conditioning.

Because brick kind of retains cool air. Right, right. And so part of what results from all of this is that the buildings in Georgia look different from the buildings in Arizona, look different from the buildings in Chicago, because in each of those places, we're designing buildings that react to the particular climate in those environments. And so this is the first big change. Think of a time when you have to design a building to interact with what's going on

outside with how humid it is, with how hot it gets. But the other thing that was very different in the pre-air conditioning environment is that there were just a lot fewer people living in the parts of the United States that were really hot and swampy. So it's kind of incredible to think about it, but like 1940, there are fewer people living in the state of Florida than living in the state of Arkansas. There are about 8,000 people total living in the city of Las Vegas. Dallas and Houston are nowhere to be found on the list of the largest cities in America.

So fundamentally, before air conditioning, there just aren't a lot of people living in places where it is uncomfortable if you're not controlling the temperature in some way. Right. If it's too hot, then you just don't live there. Right. So climate shapes your decisions about where to live. It shapes your decisions about how to build housing. It shapes your decisions about where to spend your time in your house. Maybe you go onto your front porch in the evening when it's cooling down.

You know, in many ways, our behavior is shaped by the climate. And then air conditioning comes along, and it totally changes everything that I've been talking about because now the outdoor climate doesn't really affect what your life is like indoors. Just tell us about that moment because I don't think any of us really know the story. Yeah. So, I mean, there have been contraptions invented in the 1900s that were trying to do things like blow forced air over big blocks of ice in order to cool it.

But the thing that we really think of as air conditioning is just totally a 20th century story. It starts at the very beginning of 20th century in 1902 when Willis Carrier invents this machine. It's kind of controlling the temperature and the humidity and the purity of air particularly in an industrial context You know the very first use of this in 1902 is in a printing plant and fundamentally the problem that it's solving is that the moisture

Content in the air is really sort of becoming a problem for printing documents. You're saying basically publishing journalism a problem for printing documents. You're saying basically publishing journalism is responsible for air conditioning. Yes, everybody can thank us and then later they can blame us. And so in the beginning, what air conditioning is doing is it's sort of solving an industrial problem. The machines are hot or maybe it's a textile mill and too much humidity is sort of destroying your textiles. And also you know you want your workers to be productive

in these manufacturing spaces. Lots of people in a small space with hot machines, right? Yeah. And so in the very beginning of the 20th century, it's not about providing comfort for people. It's about conditioning the environments that manufacturing and industry is happening. And then it is this very sort of long story that plays out over several decades

where this invention moves from these industrial spaces into these other kinds of spaces. Yes, you lucky people, just sit back for a moment, relax and notice the delightfully clean, cool and refreshing atmosphere of this scientifically air-conditioned theater. Great isn't it?

So then it comes into theaters and becomes almost this marketing tool to attract people inside. You can enjoy great motion picture entertainment all summer long in cool comfort. Go see a movie and enjoy air conditioning while you're in there. Yes, low-cost all season air conditioning is the right time for you, and you're so right to choose a 55-rambler cross-country. And then at the same time, you know, cars in America that have air conditioning in them, the share of those cars is rising and rising.

It moves into office buildings. Instead of traveling away from business and home to seek relief, you can obtain the same comfort right in your own home or office through air conditioning. And then eventually after sort of decades of refining this technology and it gets smaller and it gets more affordable and it becomes more advanced. This lucky baby will sleep quietly through the night. It reaches the American home and we get the window unit This baby's RCA air conditioner will keep his room filled with

Dry fresh air and the window unit is this much more affordable? Portable easy to pick up at the store bring to your house You don't need to get a special installer you stick it in your your window, and now all of a sudden, you're getting all of these benefits of humidity-controlled, temperature-controlled air inside of your home. Humidity-controlled, dust and pollen filtered. My indoor climate is always perfect. At that point, it's off to the races. It sort of takes over the American home.

And we can sort of see in census data, for instance, that by about the start of the 1970s, about half of all new single-family homes that are built in America have air conditioning in them. And the other thing that we see in census data at this time is that Americans themselves are starting to move to places that are really hot, like Florida, like Texas, like Arizona, like Nevada, places that were kind of uninhabitable before air conditioning.

Now they're booming in population. And there was this wonderful editorial that was actually published in the Times in 1970 about the census that year, and how 1970 was like the air conditioning census. And it refers to how air conditioning had become this really powerful influence for circulating people as well as air in this country. And this is a story that continues like right up until this day where air conditioning is sort of extending its reach into every corner of the country, you know, every sort of housing type. And today about two thirds of American households in this country have central air and about

90%. So nine in 10 of them have some kind of air conditioning if we include things like window units. And if we look just at new housing that's built in America today, looking back in 2023, about 98% of new single-family homes in America had air conditioning. I mean, what you're talking about is basically 200 or so million air conditioning units, condensers, boxes. That's a lot.

Yeah. And as air conditioning has extended its reach into every corner of the country, into so many of the buildings where we spend time, I think it becomes clear that we've really kind of engineered our modern lives entirely around it. And our reliance on this technology going forward is both unsustainable and in fact it's put a lot of people in a very vulnerable position. We'll be right back. Emily, walk us through how our reliance on air conditioning is both, as you just said, unsustainable and perhaps even kind of dangerous to us.

So the first obvious thing that it does is it just requires an enormous amount of energy for so many people to be air conditioning so many spaces all the time. And so to sort of think about this in a larger sense, our buildings in the United States are responsible for about 30% of the greenhouse gas emissions. And that refers to the fossil fuels that we burn directly to heat and cool buildings and to cook in them, but also to generate the electricity that then allows us to do things like plug in our window units. So there's a ton of energy use happening here.

But part of what's also happening is that all of these buildings have been fundamentally designed to consume lots of energy. A lot of these buildings were built during a time, you know, in the 50s and the 60s and in more recent years where energy was cheap. The idea that you're designing a building that demands lots of energy, who cares? We're not paying a ton of money for the energy.

And in the 60s and in the 50s, we weren't particularly thinking about whether or not using energy is going to cause climate change. So because of this, we get this glut of inefficient houses, and this happens not just with houses, but with everything in the built environment. Think about strip malls, shopping centers, workplaces, even offices. This sort of ubiquitous, tall, boxy, glass-covered office building that we think about in cities all over the country, all over the world. This is a building that is born out of the air conditioning age. That

glassy box is designed around air conditioning such that, you know, without air conditioning, those kinds of offices don't make sense. Right. I'm thinking about the office that you and I call home, the New York Times, high rise building in Midtown, that does not feel for all its virtues like a building you'd want to be in without air conditioning. It's glass and tall, and I think it'd be very hot. Yeah, I mean, when you think about

tall glass office buildings, they're basically greenhouses if you're not controlling the air inside. They're designed such that not only do you not have to open a window in order to cool off You couldn't open a window even if you wanted to these buildings don't have windows that open because they're designed to be these Hermetically sealed environments where we're gonna keep the outside climate out and we're gonna control the climate on the inside and This idea that the outside doesn't matter is true in the design of so many of our buildings, our offices, even our homes. And that actually puts people

into an incredibly vulnerable situation. And vulnerable how exactly? So let's assume a storm comes through and the power goes out. Or your air conditioning stops working because you've been running it all the time all summer long. Or when we have these extreme heat conditions and the electric utility tells you, please try to preserve the amount of air conditioning that you're using. What happens when all of a sudden millions of people who have been living in an environment designed entirely around air conditioning can't have that air conditioning? Like we start to see real problems.

And you know, this is an abstract, like we have actually seen this happen in the United States, even this year, in other recent years, where terrible storms have ripped through the state of Texas and millions of people have been left without power. And when this happens in the middle of a heat wave, people die. Right, and that seems like an example of the multiple ways that air conditioning conspires to make us avoid contending with the realities of heat, to return to this idea you introduced earlier on, AC allows more people to go to a place like Texas than they'd ever go if there weren't AC making them comfortable, and to design and live in homes and offices that become

a cauldron without air conditioning when it fails. Exactly. I mean, air conditioning makes it possible for people to believe that you could be comfortable in Texas in the summer, in Arizona in the summer. And so people move to these places in large numbers. And then when the air conditioning fails, they're sort of suddenly thrust into a world where they're living in the middle of the Arizona desert or they're living in the middle of Texas on a 110 degree

day and that could be life threatening. Especially with climate change making it even hotter in these places, it doesn't really seem sustainable for a lot of people to live in those places without air conditioning, without some kind of artificial tempering of the environment. Yeah, and it's not just because of the heat. I mean, is it sustainable for a metropolitan area of 5 million people to exist in Phoenix, in the middle of the desert, when there's also not enough water there for everyone? You know, so air conditioning sort of lulls people into moving to these places, which might be problematic for lots of other reasons as well, but we've sort of convinced ourselves that the climate doesn't matter. We're going to control it.

We're going to engineer our way into living with it. You're reminding me, Emily, of an episode we did on the show about this very idea. It focused on the water shortage in Arizona and the plans to pipe in and, as I recall, desalinate ocean water to deal with the problem of not enough water in Arizona. And it doesn't really seem fathomable that that proposition would ever occur to people if they weren't living there in the comfort of air conditioning in the first place. Yeah. So, I mean, there have been people living in the region of Phoenix for centuries. So, it's not that nobody can ever live there, but what air conditioning does is it enables

millions of people to live there who don't actually want to contend with 100 degree temperatures all summer long. So a place like Phoenix then becomes this perfect example where we now have 5 million people living in the middle of the Arizona desert and they all have this expectation of comfort there, that any environment that I move into, in my home, in my office, in my car, I should be encased in the sort of cooling, calm, 72 degree humidity controlled environment. And that sense of comfort becomes so deeply entrenched kind of culturally, and this isn't

just about Phoenix, this is about sort of all of us I think we have set up an expectation or even an entitlement around comfort such that it makes it really difficult to start to ask people do you really need to turn up your air conditioning today? So that makes me wonder how people are ever gonna get off the air conditioning hamster wheel that we're describing here. I mean, why would anyone? Well, we have to figure out how to do something if we want to address climate change, right? So there are a number of different things that are going to happen here.

Air conditioning is going to become more efficient. We're going to have more renewable energy sources to power it in the future. And I think we're increasingly going to see architects and builders trying to rediscover these lost ideas that we used to have about how to design buildings with the climate in mind, you know, how to shade them, how to ventilate them in a more natural way. But I also have talked to some people who say that all of that is not going to be enough.

One of them is Daniel Barber, who's an architectural historian who has thought a lot about life after air conditioning, or as he puts it, after comfort. You know, life in a world where we're not depending on air conditioning so much. And the point that he makes is that there are difficult things and changes that we would have to do going forward if we know that our buildings are responsible for a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, our dependence on air conditioning is responsible for a large share of that.

And we have to reduce it in some way. What we all need to do is change our own behavior. We need to sort of think anew about our relationship to comfort. And are we willing to be uncomfortable some of the time? Am I willing to wait until July to turn my air conditioning on? Am I willing to turn it off at night when it's not really necessary to use it? Am I willing to sleep at 80 degrees instead of 72 degrees? Or 68? Or 68 or 65. And he's talking about asking people to do something really difficult. He is asking people to be uncomfortable. You are, of course, by conveying this message, putting this problem on individuals,

not governments, not states. And lots of people might hear this and think the real solutions have to come from regulators, have to come from institutions, have to come from the people who have a lot more control over how this all works. I think that there are some ways in which that will happen too. When we think about new buildings that are being designed or renovated today that are trying to adopt some of these techniques to be less reliant on indoor air conditioning,

they're often institutional buildings. You will see cities commit to when we rebuild our schools, when we build a new library, when we build a new civic center, we are going to embody these things that we are asking other people to do too. And obviously there are government incentives in the United States, for instance,

to better insulate your home, to do things that would make your home greener. So there's certainly a role for government, but what Daniel Barber at least would argue is that we all bear some responsibility. And air conditioning has lulled us into thinking that we're not impacted by how hot it is outside, but it's also maybe lulled us into thinking that we're not impacted by how hot it is outside, but it's also maybe lulled us into thinking like I'm not the one who needs to particularly

change my behavior in any way. But fundamentally what we're talking about is people embracing a kind of different cultural idea about what it means to be comfortable. The idea that existing in a room that is artificially cooled to 68 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit, that that's the ideal temperature, that's not like some true fact about the human body, that's like a cultural idea that's been created over decades by the air conditioning industry,

by architects and builders and culture and shopping malls and movie theaters. And the idea that comfort means this one particular thing is an idea that we have constructed ourselves. And so, you know, what if we culturally came up with a different idea about comfort? What if more people came to accept the idea that going and sitting out on my front porch in the evening is where I get comfort from? And it's also, by the way way like how I interact with my neighbors and I had stopped doing that when we

were all retreating inside to air conditioning. What if we revived the idea that it's actually quite lovely in the summertime to sleep with an open window and to have fresh air? You know it's not impossible to change ideas about this because we created these ideas in the first place. Well, Emily, thank you very much. We really appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

On Thursday, the White House said that its newfound authority to use the Medicare program to negotiate prices of prescription drugs with pharmaceutical companies is likely to save taxpayers about $6 billion a year. That power came from President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which became law two years ago. Under it, regulators have now lowered the price of widely used treatments, including blood thinners and medications for arthritis and diabetes, some by up to 79 percent. And both vice presidential nominees, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, have agreed to debate each other on October 1st during a televised face-off hosted by

CBS News. That means there will be three debates before Election Day, one vice presidential debate, and two presidential debates between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Finally, remember to catch a new episode of The Interview right here tomorrow. This week, David Marchese speaks with the singer Jelly Roll about addiction, recovery, and putting his whole self into his music. I think of everything as a going out of business sale, and I give everything I got, everything I do, every time I do it right now.

Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lin and Diana Lin, with help from Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Devin Taylor, contains research help from Susan Lee, original music by Marian Lozano, Dan Powell, Rowan Emisto, and Will Reed, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you on Monday.