Image credit: Flickr/Wyinoue
PUBLISHED IN JACOBIN, 30 AUGUST 2018.
The sweltering temperatures that have blanketed the world this summer haven’t just been uncomfortable — they’ve been downright deadly.
Last month, a heat wave in Québec took the lives of as many as ninety people. At least fifty-three people died in Montreal alone, the victim of temperatures that shot past 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). The city morgue reported being overwhelmed — the first time this has happened due to heat-related casualties.
The majority of those affected were from vulnerable communities, those who lived alone, and those suffering from chronic or mental illness. The poor, the sick, the elderly. Infants, whose internal temperature regulatory mechanisms remain underdeveloped. A lack of air-conditioning proved lethal.
All across the planet, blistering temperatures are sending people to their deathbeds. Some forty-four people died last month in Tokyo, eleven on one Saturday alone. Kumagaya, near the capital, registered the hottest temperature on record for the country: 41.1 degrees C (105.98 degrees F).
In May, Karachi, Pakistan suffered sixty-five deaths in three days when temperatures hit 44 degrees C (111 degrees F). In the south of Iran, security forces have suppressed violent protests as temperatures soar past 50 degrees C(122 degrees F).
We cannot attribute any individual extreme weather event to climate change — there is simply too much natural variability, and many types of disasters (including droughts, floods, and wildfires) have social and economic causes, not just meteorological ones. Take the recent wildfires in Greece. We shouldn’t downplay the role of European Union–imposed austerity in exacerbating conditions. As Yiannis Baboulias recently reported in the London Review of Books: “Firefighters often work on seasonal contracts, and in some cases their budget is so stretched they have to buy their own boots.” Likewise, during British Columbia’s recent record-busting wildfires, the province was briefly home to the worst air quality in the world — the result, at least in part, of a decade and a half of conservative governments that slashed public spending and ignored warnings from forestry and fire service experts about the need to remove dangerous forest fuels.
But even if we accept that individual extreme weather events and their impacts involve multiple factors, we can still say that the increased frequency, duration, and intensity of heat waves around the world are consistent with a warming planet. Worldwide, seventeen of the last eighteen years have been the hottest on record.
In 2003, much of Western Europe suffered through the region’s hottest summer on record since 1540, causing some seventy thousand excess deathsacross the continent. France was hit especially hard, with 14,802 heat-related deaths (most of them elderly people). Air-conditioning was at the time, and still to a great extent, unusual in the country.
As the climate changes, we have to place as much emphasis on adapting to the warming that is already locked in as we do in mitigating its causes. And as part of this adaptation, we should view air-conditioning in most locations as a right.
The Right to Air-Conditioning
What would it mean to have a right to air-conditioning? Precisely, the right should be to have free or cheap, reliable access to the thermal conditions optimal for human metabolism (air temperatures of between 18 degrees C and 24 degrees C, according to the World Health Organization). Neither too hot nor too cold. The right to Goldilocks’s porridge, if you will.
New buildings must come with A/C as part of any “Green New Deal.” The aim of any program of publicly subsidized mass retrofitting of old buildings shouldn’t be just to fuel-switch away from gas heating and improve insulation, but also to install quiet, efficient air-conditioning systems. At the scale of the electricity grid, this demand must also include the requirement that A/C run on cheap, clean electricity.
The primary goal would be to save more lives. Of all natural disasters, heat waves are the deadliest, killing more than floods, hurricanes, or earthquakes. Currently, about 30 percent of the world’s population confronts conditions beyond the threshold where air temperature and humidity are life-threatening for more than twenty days a year. Even under scenarios assuming radical reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, researchers have concluded that by the end of the century, that percentage will climb to just under half. And if emissions keep growing as they have, it will increase to just shy of three-quarters.
It is no contrarian wheeze to demand air-conditioning for all.
But even outside of air-conditioning’s role as an essential, life-saving part of public health, for all of us, there is a pretty narrow range of temperature within which we are comfortable, most productive, cozy. This is no aesthetic preference or cultural artifact. It’s a product of that same biological requirement to maintain as close to optimal metabolic conditions as possible. Most healthy humans are not going to pop their clogs if they are immediately outside this range, but overheating can still badly affect them — causing fevers, headaches, nausea, heat rash, heart strain, dehydration, heatstroke, agitation, and confusion.
Tens of millions of people suffer from non-life-threatening but nonetheless severe health impacts and disruption of livelihoods. We are much more lethargic, less productive, and experience substantially reduced cognitive capacity. In extreme cases, people become too weak too work.
We have the technology to ensure everyone can live a decent, dignified, flourishing life — at optimum, comfortable thermal conditions. When it comes to being too cold, the technologies we use to get closer to Goldilocks temperature are pretty old: clothing and fire (or, more latterly, heating). And when it comes to being too hot, the technology we use to get closer to Goldilocks temperature is much younger: air-conditioning. But apart from its relative novelty, A/C is morally no different from clothing and fire.