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Increasing populations, incomes, urbanization, and temperatures could “triple the number of AC units installed worldwide by midcentury, pushing the total toward 6 billion,” as James Temple reported for the MIT Technology Review. This could create one of the “largest sources of rising electricity demand around the world.”
Why This Matters: This is the central tension of climate change. As the world warms, cooling will be even more necessary. This is not only for comfort — it’s “for health and survival in large parts of the world,” as Temple points out. But air conditioners also “produce enough heat to measurably boost urban temperatures,” while also leaking “highly potent greenhouse gases.” And, as Emma Charlton reported for the World Economic Forum, this need for air conditioners can also increase “energy poverty,” as “more people struggl[e] to meet their energy bills from their household income.” We need a better solution to this problem that neither exacerbates climate change nor the indirect impacts of additional energy demands on the world’s most vulnerable.
Increasing Air Conditioning Units, Increasing Costs
As the world gets warmer, we will need more air conditioning units. But this “is, and always will be, a massive guzzler of energy,” to quote Temple. And it also guzzles more costs. As a new study published by ScienceDirect shows, if a household starts to use air conditioning, they will spend between 35% and 42% more on electricity. This can, as Charlton noted, put “an additional burden on families who might not be able to afford the most efficient appliances and could result in spending being diverted away from food or education towards cooling.”
What does this world actually look like, though? As the MIT Technology Review has argued, it must be clean. Temple writes, “Transitioning the electricity grid as a whole to greater use of clean energy sources, like solar and wind, will steadily reduce the indirect greenhouse-gas emissions from the energy used to power air-conditioning units.”
This will require concerted effort and will on the part of countries both individually and collectively. But it is very necessary if we are going to imagine a more just, sustainable future.
The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) has required PFAS, cancer-causing chemicals used in manufacturing, in firefighting gear for years despite cancer being the leading killer of firefighters. An extensive investigative two-part story by E&E News’ Ariel Wittenberg reveals not only the dangers of current equipment standards but the lengths the NFPA has gone to hide them.
Why This Matters: A study of 30,000 firefighters from 2010 to 2015 found that firefighters have an increased risk of many different cancers including: leukemia, malignant mesothelioma, bladder and prostate cancers, lung cancer, brain cancer, and digestive and oral cancers.
by Natasha Lasky, ODP Staff Writer World Health Organization expert Dr. Peter Ben Embarek revealed this week that the organization’s team of researchers have found two scenarios that could have transferred COVID-19 to humans. He acknowledges that COVID-19 could have been transmitted through frozen products at the Wuhan fish market, but the most likely scenario […]
By Amy Lupica, ODP Staff Writer A new study published Monday has found that a second, sneezier plague is ramping up. Allergy seasons have increased in duration by an average of 20 days since 1990. Why? Rising temperatures and an abundance of atmospheric carbon are increasing the amount of pollen in the air, and researchers say the […]
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