Cooling Emissions Are Set to Triple by 2050 as Heat Waves Intensify

Air conditioning has become a hot-button geopolitical issue as rising temperatures create dangerous conditions around the globe. Air-conditioning units are increasingly being considered as “essential infrastructure” as summer heat waves turn into a deadly and increasingly regular occurrence. But while air conditioning inarguably saves lives, in the short term, they are simultaneously contributing to global warming and distracting from other, more important approaches to managing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating climate change.“Of all extreme weather, high temperatures are overwhelmingly the most deadly,” the Economist wrote in a recent report. Indeed, a Lancet study found that, between 2000 and 2019, nearly half a million people in the world died of heat every year, most of whom were elderly and therefore more vulnerable to high temperatures. In the face of this immediate danger, air conditioning is a logical and life-saving solution, preventing approximately 190,000 deaths each year.However, while air conditioning provides life-saving relief in the short term, it’s a major contributor to global warming. Currently, refrigeration and air conditioning account for a whopping 7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and those emissions are expected to double by 2030 and triple by 2050.Set OilPrice.com as a preferred source in Google here.“Air conditioning saves lives and will remain essential during extreme heat,” Mat Santamouris, Professor of High Performance Architecture at UNSW Sydney, said in a statement released earlier this month. “But we cannot air-condition our way out of climate change. If every building depends entirely on mechanical cooling, we create enormous pressure on electricity systems while adding even more heat to our cities,” he went on to say.Plus, access to and the impacts of air conditioning are extremely uneven. Most of the world’s poor countries are in regions with hot climates, but these countries face major constraints when it comes to adopting air-conditioning, and face the harshest consequences in terms of rising temperatures, creating a deadly double-edged sword for those populations. Poor countries frequently lack the capital to update their grids and expand energy production capacity to support widespread air-conditioning adoption, and individuals also frequently lack the means to buy units.“Though more than 80% of the world’s population regularly encounter the kind of heat for which cooling is needed, just 40% of those people are able to get AC,” reports The Economist. “The greatest gap is in the poorest, hottest countries,” the report goes on to say.Moreover, the cheap kinds of units that are being installed by the poorest people in the poorest countries are particularly inefficient, causing greater strain on electric grids that are already under stress. And those units cost poor consumers dearly. According to The Economist, the poorest of the poor spent as much as 8 percent of their income on cooling, compared to the global average of 0.2-2.5 percent in wealthier households. “Poor households also face a double-whammy in efficiency,” the report details. “The cheapest machines gobble up more electricity, and are being cranked up in the leakiest, worst-insulated homes.”As a result, not only is air conditioning contributing to global warming, it’s contributing to climate injustice in critical and life-threatening ways. Air conditioning cannot be abandoned altogether, as it has become vital for human wellbeing in our changing climate. However, we need to change how and when we use the technology. Experts argue that it should be a last resort, and that there are many other technologies that should be prioritized first.A new study published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Reviews Clean Energy found that passive cooling technologies can reduce demand for air conditioning by up to 80 percent and lower ambient temperatures by more than 4 ºC (7.2 oF). Many of these technologies, such as ventilative cooling and solar control, are already at mature stages of technological development and could be scaled quickly and with relative ease. The authors argue that policies are sorely needed to promote the development and deployment for passive cooling in order to reduce reliance on air conditioning while also saving lives.By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.comMore Top Reads From Oilprice.comIran Rejects Oman’s Proposal to Evenly Divide Hormuz ControlUK Regulator Targets Data Center Land Grab on the Power GridWorld Nuclear Association: $6 Trillion Needed to Hit 2050 Capacity Goals