From the archive: The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world

The Audio Long Read

The Guardian

Society & Culture

4.3 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 14 February 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2019: The warmer it gets, the more we use air conditioning. The more we use air conditioning, the warmer it gets. Is there any way out of this trap? By Stephen Buranyi. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Guardian. The Guardian Archive Long re. Hi, my name is Stephen Buragni. I'm a writer and editor at The Guardian and I'm the
0:25.1	author of The Air Conditioning Trap How Cold Air is Heating the World, published in
0:30.0	2019 which you're about to listen to. This was a story that was actually brought to me by one of my editors.
0:37.0	I write about environmental topics and climate change quite a bit, and we're always looking for something that's close to people's lives but
0:43.4	connects to larger topics and there's nothing we like more than when something
0:47.6	kind of prosaic something normal that you might not think about turns out to have a
0:51.2	larger history and impact than you think and the air conditioning is
0:54.4	certainly one of those things. Since the article was written quite a few things
0:59.2	have changed or maybe not so much change has moved on a A lot of the things that we stago in the article,
1:05.0	so the over proliferation of air conditioning, the way in which we sort of need to change the way that we build
1:10.4	and to a certain extent live to deal with heat better.
1:13.6	I've gotten much more mainstream and have gone from just being ideas floating around
1:17.8	to something that governments and scientists and thinkers are really taking on board.
1:21.6	I think one of the things I really took away
1:24.1	from the story is that every time you sort of dig into one of these things that
1:28.3	seems so ubiquitous and normal it emerges that it has this huge effect on the way we live
1:32.2	so of course you'll learn that from the invention of air conditioning it didn't just cool, but in fact changed the way that we could build and in many cases live our lives where we could, how we could, and things like that.
1:42.6	And I think if you take anything away from it,
1:44.6	it should be that we should always be sort of vigilant about these things
1:47.5	and that the smallest thing can have the largest effect.
1:56.8	Welcome to the Guardian Long Reed, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our
2:00.6	long reads, go to the Guardian.com forward slash long read
	...

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