Air Conditioner: The Cold Overheating
ilias Ganetsos
Tragic Feedback Irony: Warmer temperatures lead to more air conditioning. More air conditioning leads to higher temperatures. The problem created by air conditioning is like, in miniature, humanity’s biggest problem in combating the climate crisis. The solutions we readily resort to only fuel the original problem. The problem of a lack of a fundamentally viable alternative.
The air conditioners, especially in regions affected by high temperatures (India, China, Africa, etc.), are the leading source of future electricity demand growth. By 2050 the electricity for air conditioners (which will jump from 1.6 billion devices today to 5.6 billion in 2050) of these populous countries will triple, reaching 37% of global demand. The US already uses as much electricity for air conditioning each year as the UK uses altogether. The IEA predicts that as the rest of the world catches up, air conditioning will account for around 13% of total global electricity and produce 2 billion tonnes of CO2 annually — roughly the same amount as India, the world’s third-largest emitter. world today.
To beat the heat, people are increasingly turning to air conditioning. The number of AC units worldwide could increase by 244% by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, and demand could increase by 59% in the US, according to a 2020 analysis by independent research group Climate Central.
In the US, extreme heat is the deadliest cause of extreme weather on the globe . There were more than 60,000 heatwave-related deaths across Europe in 2022, with 4,500 in the UK alone. In the US, 11,000 died last year alone . There is no doubt that the world needs more cooling. An analysis published last year by a consortium of nonprofits, governments and companies estimated that 1.2 billion people in 77 countries are at high risk to their health and livelihoods due to a lack of access to refrigeration. From this point of view, the use of air conditioning could seem lifesaving, but it entails a huge climate cost that later carries a double rate of deaths from the same cause. Air conditioning is rapidly evolving from a device that adds comfort and convenience to a “miracle” life support system. But even if it is so, how many really have such a cool privilege today?
Billions of people don’t have access and energy costs are huge
Air conditioner technology is expensive to purchase and operate, often making it out of reach for poor communities in the US and worldwide. In the US, research shows that lower income households are much more likely to lack access to technologies. And a 2019 study found that between 1.8 and 4.1 billion people in developing countries who regularly experience dangerously high temperatures lack access to cooling technology. Of the two billion air conditioning units in use worldwide today, the majority are concentrated in North American and East Asian countries with a higher standard of living (with Europe, which generally has a milder climate, a close second with 19 % of households own it), while only 8% of the 3 billion people in the warmer tropics have air conditioning, compared to over 90% of households in America and Japan. The US uses more cooling energy per person than any other country on the planet. In 2016, 328 million Americans — less than 5% of the world’s population — used more energy for cooling than the 4.4 billion people living across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, excluding China.
Our conditioning divides us unequally by race and class . The NYC “Environment & Health Data Portal “ notes that “the risk of heat wave-related illness or death is highest in communities with less green space and poor communities of color that have experienced historical racism and segregation . “ In fact, communities that have historically experienced racism and segregation (eg Redlining ) are warmer because of this history. Less funding to plant trees in Harlem decades ago means less shade today, which means a warmer neighborhood than one just a few blocks south. In New York, black residents make up only 22% of the population, but account for nearly 50% of the city’s heat deaths.
Unfortunately, however, it is not only the financial challenge of building and distributing more cooling systems. The environmental cost is the most ominous part of the case. Making indoor spaces cooler for humans means making outdoor environments warmer for all other living things, with more industrial production and energy consumption contributing to the accumulation of greenhouse gases.
THE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT
Most air conditioner models require the use of chemicals that contribute to global warming. Air conditioning produces about 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, releasing more than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide each year and accounting for about 10 percent of total global electricity consumption. AC appliances typically use hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a class of dangerous greenhouse gases that trap far more heat than carbon dioxide. Most AC units also still use refrigerants which are potent greenhouse gases (GHGs) thousands of times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, the main GHG.
The most commonly used — R-410A — is more than 2,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
As the machines operate, the refrigerant travels in pipes between low and high pressure areas, turns into a gas as it absorbs heat from the inside, and releases the heat outside as it condenses back into a liquid. In gaseous form, HFCs can leak through joints in piping (a typical residential unit can lose 10% of its refrigerant each year) or can be released entirely if an air conditioner is disposed of without being properly drained.
Air conditioners also contain Freon. Freon is a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), which destroys the ozone layer and also acts as a global warming gas. By 1974, the industrialized world was releasing CFCs, chemicals that had never appeared on the planet in significant quantities, at a rate of one million metric tons per year — the mass equivalent to more than 500,000 cars. That was the year atmospheric chemists Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina first hypothesized that the chlorine molecules in CFCs might be destroying ozone in the stratosphere by bonding with free oxygen atoms and disrupting the delicate chemistry of the atmosphere.
The ozone layer absorbs the worst of the sun’s UV radiation. Without stratospheric ozone, life as we know it is impossible. A 1 percent reduction in the thickness of the ozone layer leads to thousands of new cases of skin cancer. Greater depletion would lead to crop failures, erosion of oceanic food systems, and ultimately the extinction of all life on Earth.
Under the United Nations’ Kigali Amendment, agreed in 2016, many countries are phasing out HFCs — those harmful refrigerants used in many air conditioners — and replacing them with more climate-friendly options, such as hydrofluoroolefins or HFOs. Experts agree that a quick end to HFCs could prevent up to 0.5ºC of warming over the next century — a third of the way to the Paris Climate Agreement goals.
Similar moves have worked in the past. The Kigali Amendment is an update to the Montreal Protocol that helped phase out ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, signed in 1987 and remains the only successful international environmental agreement with binding emissions targets to date to eliminate the industrial production of CFCs by 1997.
Some air conditioners now use, therefore, more environmentally friendly synthetic refrigerants, Hydrofluoroolefins (HFO). However, even if they are promoted as a sustainable alternative to HFCs, they cause a serious impact on the environment. A study from Canada’s York University reveals that while HFOs may be less harmful to the climate, they break down in the atmosphere and create high levels of trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) — which is very harmful and toxic to human health and the environment. Levels of these chemicals have increased tenfold since 1990 and will continue to rise as more HFOs are used worldwide. To prevent this potentially dangerous TFA build-up, the spread of HFOs must be slowed, or the Montreal Protocol may need to be strengthened once again to phase out the latest synthetic refrigerant.
Fortunately, HFOs are not the only alternative to HFCs — natural refrigerants, including ammonia, carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons, are feasible, and climate-neutral solutions are increasingly being adopted in refrigeration equipment worldwide.
OUR ALTERNATIVES
A future in which the shift to a sustainable and efficient use of renewable energy sources seems possible, but in reality we are far from such a thing. It will take several decades to transform the country’s entire infrastructure while lobbying oil and gas giants such as Big Oil, ExxonMobil and ADNOC are resisting every step of this transformation. Above all, renewable energy is not free from material limitations or physical limitations. Solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles require land as well as steel and conflict minerals such as cobalt and lithium, which are reshaping places like Bolivia and the Democratic Republic of Congo where they are mined. The International Institute for Sustainable Development has released detailed reports linking US demand for renewable energy infrastructure to increased “fragility and corruption” in regimes around the world. If saving and improving human lives is what we are after with renewable energy — and it should be — we need to make sure that the lives of developed countries are not improved at the expense of poorer peoples.
Energy efficiency improvements can reduce demand. The best AC design can use less energy for the same cooling intensity. Better infrastructure design can also make better use of energy at its source. Currently, about 66% of electricity generated is lost before it reaches users. Experts point out that attention should be turned to alternative ways of cooling, which allow people to maintain a tolerable standard of living indoors without causing irreversible damage to the environment.
According to the British media Guardian, one of the most popular air conditioning technologies is electric heat pumps, which can heat and cool homes. On hot days, the devices draw warm air outside the house and draw cool air inside. Heat pumps are much more efficient than traditional air conditioners, while requiring smaller amounts of refrigerants.
However, the effort to improve the energy efficiency of air conditioners remains vital. According to the International Energy Agency, in 2018 air conditioners in operation globally were not even half as efficient as they could be based on available technology. And less efficient models — often found in low-income households — require even more energy to run.
Other common technologies can play an important role in cooling homes. Fans, for example, are much cheaper and use much less energy than air conditioners, according to Yale professor Dr. Rao. In dry environments in fact, they can be surprisingly effective.
In some areas that suffer from the combination of heat and humidity, such as Mumbai, India, dehumidifiers could also provide significant relief. In other locations, a low-energy technology known as an “ air cooler “ could be a significantly more efficient solution than an air conditioner. These devices use a fan to draw air into a cool, moist material and then circulate it back into the home.
