The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Cool Privilege | Frankly #36

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

On this steamy Frankly, Nate shares how his broken office air conditioner reminds him of the discomforts and dangers being faced by those living in high heat regions - including the heat dome over the Southern U.S and growing 'wet bulb temperature' areas around the world. Air conditioners are a modern luxury not afforded to most humans - and those that do use them are in turn part of a positive feedback loop to stay cooler while consuming more fossil energy. And yet as the climate gets hotter and hotter, climate control may shift from a luxury to a necessity for many people to even survive in parts of Earth's habitat. Can those of us with access to AC - at least as a first step - become more aware of the energy privileges we have? How will we respond in a future with less access to climate control and increasing periods of extreme heat?   To watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/UWyoPzTpJtA   For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/36-cool-privilege  

Greetings. If I look hot and sweaty, it is because I am hot and sweaty. There's something called the availability cascade, which is when you're about to have a baby, you notice other people's babies when you are about to buy a car, look at the cars that you're interested in buying. Things that are prominent in our emotional memory highlight our attention of the moment. Heat is prominent in my availability cascade. It is July 4th, late afternoon, and my office has been without air conditioning for five days. And the local electrician is on vacation.

It's 86 degrees in my office right now. It's 93 outside. It's been kind of miserable. So heat and the privilege of have. having available air conditioning has been on my mind this weekend. So by the time this airs on Friday, hopefully nothing will have happened in Ukraine and Russia. Until that situation stabilizes, it is distracting me from the core work of cultural energy transition away from the intense energy and material consumption we have today.

But just think about air conditioning. Typical air conditioner generates around 3,500 watts per hour relative to me or most of you watching this generate around 100 watts. So that's 35 human energy potentials in an air conditioner. Increasingly in the news, there's something called wet bulb temperature, which literally is you put a wet cloth over a thermometer and what the temperature is then. a combination of the actual temperature plus the humidity. And already today, 9% of humanity lives in the areas that the wet bulb temperature is such that without air conditioning or shade, people cannot survive for more than six hours.

Because what ends up happening is your body, the sweat is not able to evaporate, even if you have water and salt and such. And of course, we take this for granted. Climate is going to warm two degrees or two and a half degrees or whatever the ending point is. And I do have a couple of episodes coming up talking about that with Roger Pilke and Kevin Anderson in July. We kind of emotionally take it for granted because a lot of the people listening to this show have access to air conditioning. What about the Indian subcontinent people who have already been. living with hot temperatures and knowing how to deal with it. Of course, I have the various privilege of being white, being born in the United States, being human, and being born on the tail end of the carbon pulse, all of which give me enormous privilege. But I also have energy privilege. And it's when that privilege is removed is when you recognize it. I've been miserable these last five days. But this isn't about me.

This is about gratitude, recognition, appreciation of the energy services that we get from mostly fossil carbon and hydrocarbons. By the way, the majority of the electricity that powers my air conditioner is from natural gas-powered plants with some coal, a little bit of nuclear in the mix where I live. So there's a positive feedback. In order to stay cool, we have to add more emissions to the atmosphere, which makes it warmer in the future. So there was a recent paper showing, and hopefully Lizzie can show the graphic on the screen here, that the purplish areas as we go through this century will be uninhabitable for humans and presumably other animals living in those areas as well. It ends up being, if 9% of people live in those areas today,

between 25 and 40% of today's humans will live in those areas in 75 years. So coolness and the ability to have shade air conditioning, et cetera, is going to become a pretty important thing in the future. Already, you see this week there's a heat dome. The jet stream is doing funky things. The south of the United States is 115, 120 degrees. Effective temperatures. Places in Iran and Iraq are 50 degrees Celsius.

This is, of course, because of the heat in the heat. in the El Nino is closer to the top of the ocean and so is making the atmosphere warmer. I don't know how that's going to unfold. My point here is I'm grateful for air conditioning. I'm grateful for the climate-controlled seasons because of the access to the carbon pulse that I have. And just something to consider. So this frankly is, for those of you listening to this that live in a hot area and have an air-conduble, conditioner, really be grateful for it because, boy, it makes things a lot more enjoyable, comfortable,

and makes me able to do my work. Not only that, but I had to move my ducks out of my bedroom. They couldn't be in here at that heat. So that's all my little reflection for the day. Have a good week. I'll talk to you next week. Thanks.