Kill Your Air Conditioner

By Joe Klein

On the weekend of the summer solstice, my wife and I went to a wedding in New England. The weather was perfect -- mid-70s, sunny, with an exquisite whisper of breeze. We stayed at a classic little inn... classic except for the air-conditioning blasting through the lobby. I asked the innkeeper why he felt the need to refrigerate when the weather outside was so amenable. "I wish we didn't. It's expensive. I'd love to keep the temperature about 75," he told me, "but the guests demand it."

The unnecessary refrigeration of America has become a chronic disease. It seems to have gotten worse over the past few years, with thermostats routinely set at 68deg.F, and sometimes even 65 deg., in the (far too many) hotel rooms I've suffered on the campaign trail. "Americans seem to keep their houses cooler in summer than they do in the winter," muses Edward Parson, an environmental expert at the University of Michigan Law School. But it's hard to know for sure, since there are no comprehensive studies that measure air-conditioning trend lines.

I will confess a bias here. I love warm weather, even when it slouches toward humidity. I detest the harsh, slightly metallic quality of the air forced through even the fanciest AC systems. The only air conditioner I own sits, unused, in my car; my home is happily unrefrigerated. But given the energy mess we're in, I can now gild my personal preference with a patina of high-mindedness: air-conditioning is bad for the planet, and for national security, and for our balance-of-payments deficit. Unfortunately, it is not as bad as I'd like it to be -- in part because not all of our electricity is provided by fossil fuels (although coal does predominate). And also because air-conditioning represents a relatively small slice of our energy use, an estimated 4%.

But that's still pretty egregious. We used an estimated 4 quadrillion British thermal units on air-conditioning in 2006, which is more than the total energy usage of all but 21 countries. And a fair amount of that is peak usage -- the sort that sends the electric grid crackling toward brownouts and meltdowns and increases the demand for the construction of more electric power plants (and the pollution they spew -- unless they use renewable sources like hydropower or, as John McCain correctly insists, nuclear power, which should be carefully reconsidered). "A lot of utilities supplement their main power sources with quick-acting oil- or gas-driven generators on the hottest days of the year," says Lee Schipper of the University of California, Berkeley. Schipper estimates the cost of peak usage is 20 cents per kW-h, as opposed to an average of 13 cents for "baseload capacity" usage, and it is far more carbon-intense because it is generated by oil or gas.

Schipper also estimates a savings of 4% for every degree warmer you push your thermostat. If you're set at 70deg.F now and move it to 75deg.--a comfortable, if slightly chilly number to my mind--you save 20% of the cost and energy of your air-conditioning bill. Schipper also says the savings from more-efficient air-conditioning systems can be enormous: in many Asian and European hotel rooms, the AC and electricity are activated only when you slip your magnetic room key into a slot near the door. A program to retrofit all public buildings with high-tech glass and insulation would save untold amounts of energy and electricity -- and create thousands of green-collar jobs.

There is a certain reluctance among politicians to proselytize about energy conservation. It's not as sexy as promoting high-tech gizmos like photovoltaic arrays or electric cars. It reminds people -- of a certain age -- of Jimmy Carter, in his dreadful cardigan sweater, telling them to set their thermostats at 68deg.F in winter to conserve oil. Carter was certainly right about that one -- heating represents nearly twice (roughly 7%) the energy usage that air-conditioning does. By contrast, the Bush Administration has had a policy of malignant neglect, enunciated by Dick Cheney, who once called conservation a "sign of personal virtue" but not a national goal. "After Carter, sacrifice became a hot-button word," Schipper says. "But there's a reasonable position between sacrifice and just being foolish."

Actually, George W. Bush's failure to call for sacrifice -- and fuel conservation would have been a great one -- after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has been one of the great failures of his presidency. The next President will not have the luxury of that sort of indolence, and, happily, both Barack Obama and John McCain have been talking about conservation as a means to get our energy situation under control. So why not start now? I'd like to see both candidates call for an immediate 5deg.F thermostat adjustment, just to get the conservation ball rolling -- and because it would be a "personal virtue" for each candidate to ask it of us. And I'd like to wish you all a nice, warmer summer.