You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. A paradox. The globe is heating up,

and the air conditioning we depend on to keep us cool only makes the climate hotter. As sustainable

development activist Rachel Kite reminds us, the global wealthy can afford to keep ourselves cool,

while the global poor cannot.

In her 2021 talk at the Countdown Summit,

Kite offers ways we can keep everyone cool without harming the planet.

This summer, I was visiting family in England.

There was a heat wave. It was hot and it was humid.

There was very little breeze. The temperature was hovering around 29 degrees centigrade for days on end,

and the nights were not much better. In our little bungalow, there was nowhere to get cool.

We had one fan sort of moving hot air around.

I was worried for my mum.

Heat can send your heart rate all the way up.

The only place to get cool, the only relief,

was at the supermarket in town,

standing in front of the chiller cabinets.

In 2021, extreme heat has captured the headlines on every continent, and globally in July,

surface temperatures were the highest recorded since records began in 1880. The problem is that the way we cool things down is heating the planet even more.

Today's air conditioning is energy inefficient, depends on polluting refrigerants, such as hydrofluorocarbons, and many traditional cooling technologies waste heat.

I'm sure you've had that experience of walking in an alley behind a convenience

store and feeling that blast of hot air on your face coming from the chillers inside.

And the demand for cooling is going up. The International Energy Agency estimates that by 2050,

...