Whenever people ask me how my wife and I have endured 25 Kansas summers almost entirely without air-conditioning, I like to say we do it because air-conditioning makes it too hot outside. We’re not ascetics, Luddites or misers; we just want to keep living comfortably, indoors and out.
It’s not just that air-conditioning is making our summers even hotter. (On a sweltering night in a city like Houston, the hot air that A.C. units blast out over the streets can raise outdoor temperatures up to three or four degrees.) It’s also that air-conditioning has altered the way most Americans experience heat.
Our bodies have grown so accustomed to climate-controlled indoor spaces, set at a chilly 69 degrees, that anything else can feel unbearable. And the greenhouse gases created by the roughly 90 percent of American households that own A.C. units mean that running them even in balmy temperatures is making the climate crisis worse.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that anyone switch the air off in the middle of a heat wave. Year in and year out, heat waves kill more people than any other type of natural disaster. If you live in Miami or Phoenix, you need air-conditioning to survive the summer. But if you live in the middle of the country, try leaving the air-conditioning off when it’s hot but not too hot.
Our species evolved, biologically and culturally, under wildly varying climatic conditions, and we haven’t lost that ability to adapt. Research suggests that when we spend more time in warm or hot summer weather, we can start feeling comfortable at temperatures that once felt insufferable. That’s the key to reducing dependence on air-conditioning: The less you use it, the easier it is to live without it.
When I was growing up in Georgia, my family moved into our first air-conditioned house when I was 12, and I loved it. But I left home for college in the 1970s, and I’ve lived mostly without A.C. ever since.
I’ll admit, we run our house’s ancient central air system for two or three days each summer, usually when we have dinner guests or out-of-town visitors. During heat waves — such as the one that gripped the middle of the country this week, when temperatures rose above 100 degrees and our brains became heat-addled and the sheets sweat-soaked — we deploy a portable air-conditioner in the bedroom overnight. But this week was just the second time we’ve turned it on this year.
To keep us going through the rest of the summer, we rely on electric fans, which consume only about 2 percent of the energy needed to air-condition one room. They’re not only free of the refrigerants that amplify air-conditioning’s contribution to global warming; they can also save you money. Our June electric bill informed us that we’d used 80 percent less electricity than other homes in our town with similar (in our case, modest) square footage.
Most of those savings were likely the result of using fans instead of air-conditioning. We also kept other appliances and devices turned off as much as possible because they, too, generate heat. Dishwashers are double trouble, putting out heat and humidity. We don’t have one.
You can’t unplug the refrigerator, of course, but we keep ours set for just under 40 degrees, the highest safe temperature, according to the Food and Drug Administration. And we dry our laundry on the clothesline out back.
When it gets too hot, we lightly spray water on our arms, legs and faces; the water helps dissipate a lot of heat. A quick, cold shower or a little time spent with that all-American favorite, the lawn sprinkler, also can bring relief.
In summer we’ll spend as many of our at-home hours as we can outdoors, in the shady city park down the street or on our screened porch.
In a 1979 book the architect Lisa Heschong maintained that just as the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch crave variety, the thermal sense does, too. A tightly controlled “optimum” temperature is the thermal equivalent of beige, elevator music or soda crackers.
Here in Kansas, there’s ample temperature fluctuation to enjoy; when a storm front rolls through on a hot, sticky afternoon, the mercury can drop 20 degrees in a matter of minutes. Those storm cycles feel good because they give our thermal sense a good workout.
When cranking up the air-conditioning is necessary, by all means, let’s do it. But the more time we can spend outside or inside without the air-conditioner blasting, the better prepared we’ll be — both to slow climate change and to adapt to it.
The post I Swore Off Air-Conditioning, and You Can, Too appeared first on New York Times.
