Quote of the Day: Edward McClelland on Air Conditioning
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 08.25.08
Willis Carrier with his first air conditioner
We have written often how electricity-sucking air conditioners caused the massive post-war transfer of people and votes to the sunbelt; Edward McClelland of Salon thinks that air conditioners make people vote Republican.
"Air conditioning offends my sense of Northern pride. They have a saying in Maine: "If you can't stand the winters, you don't deserve the summers." But the air conditioner allows Arizonans to enjoy a cool, lakelike breeze in the comfort of their living rooms, without ever having to buy snow tires. As one who has seen firsthand how the Sun Belt created a poor Yankee cousin called the Rust Belt, I blame the air conditioner for the decay of Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo, N.Y. I blame it for the decline of the American labor movement. And I blame it for the election of George W. Bush, as well as the fact that we haven't elected a Yankee president in nearly 50 years. Honestly, I don't want something like that in my house. Especially if I have to pay for it." ::Salon
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I've often felt that AC is one of the great life-changing inventions of the 20th century. Carrier should be up there w/Edison as someone who transformed our landscape. Only point I'd add is that down here in the sunbelt we don't call it "air conditioning" in the summer. We call it "life support".
The word "yankee" is not as widely known as this person would like. Obsessing over a machine that makes life better for MOST people is beyond silly. He's trying to passively say that people from the "sun belt" are inferior because they're from the "sun belt" and they like AC. I'm guessing he's one step away from the Andy Rooney stage of perpetual bickering and whining about the olden days.
I bet Edward McClelland heats his house in the winter.
Yankee hypocrite.
EXACTLY. I live in Tucson AZ and even though I really try to use AC as little as possible, there are about 2 months in the summer where I would literally die without a little AC.
EXACTLY. I live in Tucson AZ and even though I really try to use AC as little as possible, there are about 2 months in the summer where I would literally die without a little AC.
It's important to note that it takes a lot less electricity to cool a house than it does to heat it. This b/c you're going from 90 or 100 degrees down to 70 to cool a house vs. 20 or 30 up to 65 degrees to heat it.
The thing that is going to undo living in AZ isn't having to power A/C. In the future, solar power will provide all the electricity they need to cool themselves. Hopefully, that implementation will be begun by the next administration using huge subsidies and tax breaks, since electricity from renewables will affect the entire nation.
No, the thing that is going to undo living in the SW is water, or rather, the lack of it. GW is causing increased temps in the SW, which results in less rainfall. Also, GW causes less snow pack in the Rockies, so the rivers that supply the SW with water will have less water to give. Eventually severe water rationing will force people out.
JSDreyer is right, assuming the comparison is between AC and electric heat. And as higher oil and gas prices begin driving people toward electric heat, we might begin regarding AC as the more efficient form of temperature control.
AC is a tool, whose merits are to be judged by how it is used. Many people use it frivolously or have wasteful, out-of-date AC, but the tool itself is not a bad thing.
You SunBelt people are a bunch of whining pussies.
While the comment was obviously designed to offend the sensibility is what resonates so well. Learn to live with your environment. Choose the place you live in for what it is, not what it is not.
More ridiculous than anything though are the asinine comments about not being able to live with out AC by a bunch of whiners. There are millions of people who live in hotter climates than those in AZ and NM who have no AC and yet by some miraculous turn of events, they have not died. Perhaps if we built climate appropriate homes we to could learn to live with our environments.
PS. the heating/cooling debate is spot on. Zero energy homes in the North are dramatically more difficult to pull off.