I’ve Never Been an AC Person. But This Summer, Something Changed.
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I’ve never been an air conditioning guy. Even when I was a child, I had an aversion to AC; when my parents installed window units in our Civil War–era house, I slept in the natural cool of the basement, preferring silverfish and crumbling walls to the industrial roar of fake coolness. Why? I don’t have one strong objection so much as a bunch of small ones. I associate AC with the multiplex, the office, the hotel room, the airport lounge—sterile nowhere places that you walk out of while muttering, “God, I’ve got to change my life.” There’s something mildly pathetic about it: You can’t tell me it’s not sad to huddle next to a vent, breathing manufactured air that smells like keyboard cleaner and mildew, passing your summer in sealed rooms that have been cooled to precisely the same temperature they’re heated to in the winter.
No—instead, whenever it tops 95 degrees, I deal with it how I always have: I suffer, and I endure. During that unbearable stretch of two or three weeks every summer, the proverbial dog days, I muddle through by drinking huge amounts of iced water and tea, sitting in front of fans, and swabbing sweat off my upper body with towels that rapidly turn an alarming golden color. But my tried-and-true approach to beating the heat failed me this June, when an unseasonably early heat wave hit New York City. It was so hot I couldn’t sleep or concentrate even with a fan directly on me, and overnight I developed heat rash over what seemed like a third of my body. My sweat-stained mattress, when I stripped off the clammy sheets, looked like a modern-day Shroud of Turin. After my second sleepless night, I was walking around with the reaction time of someone who’d slammed eight beers, trailing off midsentence. I knew I had to do something—anything—to cool my apartment. Except, that is, get an air conditioner.
How had people put up with heat like this before AC? They adapted, for one. The time-honored tradition of the siesta, or midday nap, was born, in part, out of the desire to hunker down when the sun was at its most powerful. In Spain, where temperatures recently hit 111 degrees Fahrenheit, many locals wait until after sundown to head out, and the government is reviving ancient cooling technologies involving underground water tunnels. In the American South, homes used to be built in cool spots, surrounded by shade trees, with high ceilings, breezeways, and wide, overhanging eaves to block sunlight from baking exterior walls. In cities, people slept outdoors, or on roofs and fire escapes, although there was always some risk of rolling over and falling to one’s death. For those who could afford it, cold drinks and food offered temporary relief. Mostly, though, our forebears just gutted it out, for lack of a better alternative.
Some uniquely ingenious—or crackpot—inventions provided a degree of relief. Leonardo da Vinci built a cloth-covered water wheel that was supposed to force cool air through a series of ducts into a duchess’ boudoir. In the 19th century, some members of the British upper class put cut willow or birch branches into a trough of water placed in the center of the room, believing that the branches and leaves would somehow infuse the air with cool moisture, as described in the 1861 book Hardships Made Easy. The standard cooling system back then was a device combining a hand-powered fan blowing through wet cloth; in dry weather it had a very slight cooling effect, but if it was humid, the gadget only made it unbearably so. President James Garfield had the bad luck of being shot in early July of a very hot summer in 1881, and spent the next two months sweating in bed while doctors probed his wound with unwashed fingers. The cooling device they set up in his bedroom—basically just a fan blowing over ice—used well over 450 pounds of ice a day, per Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything, by author Salvatore Basile; maybe it would have been more effective if Garfield hadn’t insisted on keeping the windows open.
The main thing many of these makeshift cooling systems had in common was that, by and large, they sucked and didn’t work. I was about to learn this firsthand. The first cooling device I tried was a variation on one of these old-fashioned systems, a bootleg swamp cooler I’d gotten from my 70-year-old gym pal, who’d passed it on to me because he felt bad, I think, for using my unproduced TV pilot to get his A.I. chatbot to fabricate a script for the action movie he was trying to make to fund his retirement overseas. (Imagine if Sicario starred Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura mode.) He’d bought the appliance online for 20 or 30 bucks, just to get him through the mild early-summer heat, and he’d warned me that it didn’t work very well. He didn’t need a conventional air conditioner because he spent the hottest part of each summer back in his native country of Romania, whereupon landing in Bucharest he took a bus hours across the country, down a pitch-dark road spiraling hundreds of feet into the earth, to a salt mine, originally dug in the 13th century, that now operated as a health retreat. He spent several weeks each year in this subterranean crystal fortress, naturally cooled to a steady 55 degrees. The air there, he told me, had miraculous healing properties, and could cure sinus infections, tooth decay, and many other conditions. He’d invited me along the past couple summers, but I’d always declined. (“Are there any women there?” I’d asked once. “No,” he said immediately.)
It was remarkable, the degree to which his swamp cooler didn’t work. It was just a cheap plastic fan that blew across a tray of water—effectively an air conditioner that a medieval peasant would build. Being trapped underground with hundreds of Romanian men suddenly seemed like a small price to pay for a little comfort. I kept the swamp cooler running, along with a box fan next to my bed, but sleeping still wasn’t easy. The side of my body being aerated would stay cool-ish, but the side that wasn’t getting air would get hotter and more sweat-logged until I would wake up from discomfort and rotate 180 degrees. I did this all night—waking, rotating, falling back asleep—like a hot dog on those warming rollers at 7-Eleven.
The next morning, I once again felt like I hadn’t slept at all. When I went to my girlfriend’s place, she took one look at me and said, “Take the extra air conditioner!” Over the winter, someone in her building had moved out and left behind a like-new window unit, which she’d snagged on my behalf and let gather dust in the corner, anticipating a situation just like this. But now, in the relative cool of her apartment, a cold drink in hand, I started to think that I’d exaggerated the heat of the previous night; it hadn’t actually been that bad, had it?
“No,” I said, “let me try the sheets.” My girlfriend was also AC-averse, though to a lesser degree than me, and the previous summer she’d read an article about “cooling sheets” and sprung for an expensive pair of 100 percent linen, tropical-weight sheets. After a few days of heat, she’d stripped them off her bed and put in her AC unit. Now she used the sheets mainly to line the backseat of the rental car when we took a road trip with the dog. She fetched them out of the linen closet for me and handed them over; they felt like the cloth napkins at a family-owned restaurant where the waiters wear dress shirts but you can also order an Alabama slammer off the menu.
“If you need to come back in the middle of the night for the extra AC unit, that’s fine,” my girlfriend said.
“No,” I said, “these are definitely going to work.”
They did not work. I tossed and turned again, sweltering, though now I had the added bonus of feeling like a guest at the state penitentiary. I was shocked, for the thousandth consecutive time, that a product from a “best of” article featuring affiliate links didn’t work as claimed. I got up sometime before dawn, drank a quart of ice water while nude, checked the price of a flight to Romania, and wondered when, or if, the heat wave would end.
As much as air conditioning is embraced today, my anti-AC attitude was the norm just a few decades ago. When air conditioning was finally invented—first in 1851, by a Florida doctor named John Gorrie, in the form of mechanical refrigeration meant to treat “miasma fevers,” and then in 1902 by a young engineer named Willis Carrier—it was quickly adopted for commercial use in everything from food warehouses to the New York Stock Exchange. But while people came to expect air conditioning where they shopped or worked, they didn’t really want air conditioning in their homes. Postwar consumers thought of it as an unnecessary luxury, even after it became affordable, Gail Cooper writes in Air- Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900–1960, a history of the technology. The AC revolution would have to be a top-down affair, and it was. Government agencies like the General Services Administration and Federal Housing Administration pushed home air conditioning, the IRS offered hefty tax write-offs as enticements, and architects and builders followed their lead, producing buildings that were oriented around central AC. Lenders and other institutions followed in lockstep; in the 1950s, one Florida power company offered electricians $50 for every ceiling fan they removed from homes and businesses, historian Raymond Arsenault writes in “The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture,” and by the mid-’60s, some Florida mortgage companies had hiked rates for homeowners whose houses didn’t have central AC. According to the U.S. census, 18 percent of Southern homes were air-conditioned in 1960; by 1980, that number had risen to 73 percent, and was even higher in states like Florida and Texas. (If I were the type of person who averaged 16 hours of screen time a day, I might aver that the American zeal for AC is the result of a government psyop, but I’m not, so I won’t.)
As with any rapid change, there was a backlash. Some Southerners preferred to sweat, dismissing AC as a Yankee invention. They found agreement in unlikely quarters; in 1970, a New York Times editorial cited by Arsenault lamented that “the air conditioner … has smoothed out harsh differences in climate. Americans are becoming much less regionally diverse.” The famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed sealed buildings around central air conditioning, later decided it was “dangerous,” and apparently once told a New Yorker reporter, as recounted in Basile’s book, that “air conditioning has killed more good men than can be accounted for.” He wasn’t too far off: In 1976, hundreds of people who’d attended an American Legion convention at a Philadelphia hotel became sick with pneumonia; 29 died. After a long inquiry, authorities determined that the outbreak had been caused by a previously unknown microorganism, dubbed Legionella pneumophila, that had been breeding in the hotel’s AC system.
Today, there are still AC-driven lethal outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease, even if most of the country has gotten over whatever qualms they once had about air conditioning. But some uneasiness over AC—and what it represents—still persists. The subject has become sharply politicized in a warming Europe, where total air conditioner ownership is only around 20 percent; in France, the pro-AC right has used it as a cudgel against the green-promoting left, leading one French talk show host to ask, “Is air conditioning a far-right thing?” On X, the Everything App, Americans and Europeans snipe at each other over AC almost daily, the Europeans speculating on what characteristics of the typical American body, shall we say, might make artificial cooling such a necessity, while the Americans respond with “I’m proud to be an American / ’cuz at least I have AC” frog memes.
Even outside the petty realm of the culture wars, air conditioning is irrefutably political. Cooling technology uses a tenth of the electricity consumed on the planet, though in hot countries it can use over 70 percent of “peak electricity demand.” During the punishing June heat wave, evening electricity demand in New York was 90 percent higher than the off-season average. In 2022, that power demand produced 1 billion metric tons of CO2, equivalent to 238 million gas-powered cars driving for a year. Global energy demand for AC is projected to triple by 2050. The warming that makes air conditioning increasingly necessary is partly caused by the emissions from air conditioning, meaning that the more you crank your AC, the more you’ll have to crank your AC in the future. (Some point out that AC produces fewer emissions than heating, which is true, but it’s a little like saying meth will ruin your life slower than heroin; at that point, we’re just debating the trajectory of the downward spiral.) Worse yet, the amount of air conditioning in the world is being increased exponentially by the A.I. bubble. The data centers that have provoked near-universal outrage by using billions of gallons of water—what do you think that water is for? That’s right: They’re using your grandchildren’s drinking water to air condition the overheated computer houses so that Grok-askers can extrude jaundiced slop-jpgs of Donald Trump riding a bald eagle.
It takes a degree of cognitive dissonance for environmentalists and New York Times–reading liberals to blast their AC, but the math suggests that most do anyway—it becomes alarmingly easy to shrug away anything with that old truism about one individual’s actions not being a meaningful contributor to overall impact, which is how I personally justify all of my antisocial behaviors, from not recycling to torrenting HBO shows. AC-loving conservatives don’t seem to have to resort to such mental gymnastics; they embrace it proudly and unambiguously. But one has to wonder if there’s a bit of Stockholm syndrome at work there. After all, it’s more than a little ironic that the fearful, alienated modern right complains about “low-trust society” and “the loss of community”—a very specific kind of community, of course—from inside hermetically sealed bubbles of manufactured air. Maybe “open your windows” should be the new “touch grass.”
At its core, air conditioning is about control. There was no truly good reason to build a fully air-conditioned, 60,000-seat sports stadium, or to construct the air-conditioned beach in Dubai, except to show that humans could exercise dominion over the climate. That control extends to the way we live, too. Though it pains me to say it, the New York Times was right when they warned, in 1970, that air conditioning would homogenize America. Everywhere you go are the same tract homes and McMansions, apartment buildings, mixed-use strip malls, all blandly efficient shoeboxes connected via ductwork to an HVAC unit. Arsenault points out in his Journal of Southern History article that, after central AC became ubiquitous in America, the South’s culture of afternoon closures and leisurely evenings disappeared within a generation, replaced by a hyperefficient, climate-controlled, round-the-clock lifestyle. This is great if you own a tire factory or an Amazon warehouse; maybe less so for the rest of us. The problem with control is that it doesn’t resolve that which it seeks to dominate; it merely denudes it, much like how an air conditioner doesn’t cool the air so much as it strips the heat from it and vents it elsewhere. What’s left isn’t necessarily better; it’s just less.
After the grueling early summer heat wave dissipated, I got through the next month with my usual method of fans, iced tea, and grit. Then, at the end of July, my girlfriend and I headed to a beach rental that was fully air-conditioned. We suddenly found it easy to keep it blasting at all times—we were on vacation, which by definition means all the usual disciplines are abandoned. Get the extra bottle of wine, sleep ’til 2:00 in the afternoon, put the thermostat at 66. Any lingering reluctance was rationalized away: We wouldn’t want to disrespect the host by encouraging mold growth in their property, would we? I spent two of the hottest weeks of the summer nestled under a down comforter each night—and afterward, when I returned to normal life and my hot box of a Queens apartment, I was unable to handle any heat whatsoever.
What I learned about air conditioning, in those couple of weeks, is that air isn’t the only thing being conditioned—you are, too. “Air conditioning makes you soft and weak” might sound like neo-Victorian moralizing, but it’s also a scientific fact. The human body can adapt to scorching heat by increasing its ability to cool itself, but it takes two or three weeks of uninterrupted heat to hit peak efficiency. If you crank the AC the first time it hits 75, your body will never adjust, and even mild heat will forever feel like the Sumatran rain forest.
This brings us to an embarrassing truth: The unstated reverse of the oft-repeated fact that AC is an absolute existential necessity for the elderly and infirm is that, for the rest of us in America, it’s still merely a luxury (for now, at least). The larger issue is that the line between luxury and necessity has essentially been erased in this country under credit-driven consumer capitalism, where the definition of necessity is whatever lifestyle is afforded by 130 percent of your gross income. Americans have been thoroughly conditioned not just by cool air, but by decades of an effortlessly expanding economy, unquestioned cultural supremacy, zero interest rates, endless shelves of subsidized goods. We are not only the wealthiest country in the history of the planet but, more importantly, despite (or because of) all the growing indignities of modern American living, the most comfortable by nearly any material metric. While the vast majority of Americans are physically capable of living without AC, they would psychologically implode the minute their bedroom hit 77 degrees. But the nature of our comfort tilts toward consolation, rather than indulgence; we are more the tightly swaddled baby than the plutocrat reclining on a yacht. Beneath America’s projections of strength and assurance, we are a desperately addled, constitutionally nervous, and, above all, deeply fearful people. If we require comfort, it’s because we are so deeply discomfited—by our helplessness in the face of adversity, by the meanness of our desires, and, increasingly, by a future which we are just starting to suspect is inevitable, and which, even worse, we might have had a hand in creating. If the heat that presses against our windows is rising from an already ruined future, what can you do but crank the AC?
I’m including myself in that, by the way. To put it simply, I had gotten soft. My time in the beach rental had been a thorough deconditioning. I quaked at the thought of more sleepless nights and heat rash. I had become one of those people, bursting out of the double doors after a showing of Deadpool & Wolverine to exclaim, “God, it’s like an oven out here!” (It’s 82 degrees.) It’s not the heat, I say, lifting my T-shirt to allow the cool air-conditioned air to blow directly onto flesh as clammy and pink-white as thawing chicken breast—it’s the humidity. (It’s 82 degrees with moderate humidity.) The elderly are especially vulnerable to heat injury, I say with my face pressed so hard against the cool air vent that it leaves a grid of indentations in my flesh—AC is really a human right. (It’s 82 degrees and you’re young and in fine health.) After just a handful of days in icy comfort, I was now ready to live the life of a hamster, shut behind glass all day and night, breathing dirty refrigerator air, tweeting “Shut up peasant” at any European who brought up heat exchangers.
A changed—and hypocritical, so sue me—man, I went to my girlfriend’s back in the city, got the window unit, and brought it back to my apartment. After wrestling it into my bedroom window and sealing the edges, I was soaked with sweat. But when I went to plug it in, the cord was 4 feet short of the outlet. It was after midnight. I drank a quart of ice water and laid down in front of the roaring fan. Having done everything I could possibly do to remedy my situation, and having failed through no fault of my own, I had to admit: It didn’t actually feel that hot anymore.