From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.

This is The Daily.

Today, the story of how air conditioning has become both our answer to a warming planet and a major obstacle to actually confronting it. My colleague, Emily Badger, on the increasingly dangerous of trying to control the temperature. It's Friday, August 16th.

Emily, I want to start with a very personal question for you. What is your relationship to air conditioning?

At this exact moment, I am sitting no air conditioning, and it is uncomfortable.

I've turned it off because it's loud and it's not very conducive to recording a podcast.

I didn't mean right now. I meant in the larger arc of your life. But thank you for turning it off for the purposes of this episode.

Yeah. I grew up in Chicago in this brick three flat apartment building, this very classic Chicago architecture built in the early 1900s, and it didn't have air conditioning.

I didn't have air conditioning growing up. Hardly anybody I knew had air conditioning growing up because we all lived in buildings like this.

Not even window units. Just didn't happen.

No, we didn't even have a window unit in my family. It wasn't that big of a deal in retrospect. We had in this apartment these big open windows that you could open and you generate a cross breeze through them. There's this lovely breeze that comes off of Lake Michigan in the summer. When it gets really, really hot, you take a cold shower at night before you get bed. You eat a lot of ice cream. I can't even remember if we had air conditioning in the schools that I went to, but it just wasn't something that I thought very much about or really even experienced very much.

Right. You didn't miss it. You didn't even know It could be.

Yeah, exactly.

Then the first job that I got out of college, I moved to Orlando, and totally different environment.

I mean, living in Florida is the story of moving from one air-conditioned box into another. You're in your air-condition apartment, you get in your air-conditioned car, you don't walk anywhere, you drive everywhere you go. You drive to your air-conditioned office, you go to air-conditioned bars, and It's really, really integral to life there in a way that was very foreign to me as someone growing up in the north.

You went from a dearth of air conditioning to suddenly being saturated by it. Was that a happy development?

I don't think that I really gave it that much thought. I mean, living in Orlando surrounded by air conditioning, it's just that's the air that you breathe. That's the way everyone lives. I think this is probably true for lots of people. We don't really give it a lot of thought.

It's just a background part of our environment.

But as I have written for years now about urban policy in cities and how we live and how we develop cities, it's become increasingly clear to me that air conditioning is this incredibly It's an important thing that is shaping everything around us. It's shaping where Americans live, where they choose to move to. It shapes how our houses look.

It shapes what our sky lines look like. It's responsible for saving lives in heatwaves.

In many ways, it's really improved our quality of life. But it's increasingly clear to us that there are some downsides to this.

One of those downsides is that while we're all sitting in our air-conditioned homes and offices and cars, and we've set the thermostat to exactly 72 degrees, we're becoming increasingly detached from what's happening in the environment outside. It is a lot easier to ignore that it's 100 degrees outside when you're sitting inside air conditioning.

In some ways, I think we have forgotten how to live with heat.

We have forgotten how to live with the climate as it existed before air conditioning.

Having forgotten that is probably going to cause some problems for us going forward.

Well, Emily, what did the American landscape look like when people did have to contend with the heat in the days before air conditioning?

I think about two big things in particular. One is that the buildings that we spend time in looked different.

We designed houses and other kinds of buildings in ways that were really thoughtfully trying to contend with the temperature outside. You've got these buildings in the Southwest in the United States that have these thick adobe walls that do a really good job of keeping the sun and its heat out. You've got these cottages and bungalows in the that are raised up off the ground so that they're not receiving the heat that's absorbed by the Earth.

They've got big windows. They're thinking a lot about cross ventilation. They've got high ceilings so that as heat rises inside your home, you're not marinating in it while you're sitting in your living room. They've got front porches where people sit at the end of the day in order to try to cool off. Then you've got the building like the one I grew up in in Chicago, which I mentioned, these thick brick masonry buildings, which are also designed in a a way that is making it possible for me to grow up in the 1980s and '90s and be okay with the fact that I don't have air conditioning.

Because brick retains cool air.

Right. Part of what results from all of this is that the buildings in Georgia look different from the buildings in Arizona, look different from the buildings in Chicago, because in each of those places, we're designing buildings that react to the particular climate in those environments. This is the first big change.

Think of a time when you have to design a building interact with what's going on outside, with how humid it is, with how hot it gets.

But the other thing that was very different in the pre-air conditioning environment is that there were just a lot fewer people living in the parts of the United States that were really hot and swampy. It's incredible to think about it, but like 1940, there are fewer people living in the state of Florida than living in the state of Arkansas.

There are about 8,000 people total living in the city of Las Vegas.

Dallas Hustle in Houston are nowhere to be found on the list of the largest cities in America.

So fundamentally, before air conditioning, there just aren't a lot of people living in places where it is uncomfortable if you're not controlling the temperature in some way.

Right. If it's too hot, then you just don't live there.

Right.

So climate shapes your decisions about where to live. It shapes your decisions about how to build housing. It shapes your decisions about where to spend your time in your house. Maybe you go on to your front porch in the evening when it's cooling down. In many ways, behavior is shaped by the climate.

Then air conditioning comes along, and it totally changes everything that I've been talking about because now the outdoor climate doesn't really affect what your life is like indoors.

Just tell us about that moment because I don't think any of us really know the story.

Yeah. There have been contraptions invented in the 1900s that were trying to do things like blow forced air over big blocks of ice in order to cool it. But the thing that we really think of as air conditioning is just totally a 20th century story.

It starts at the very beginning of the 20th century in 1902, when Willis Carrier invents this machine. It's controlling the temperature and the humidity and the purity of air, particularly in an industrial context. The very first use of this in 1902 is in a printing plant. And fundamentally, the problem that it's solving is that the moisture content in the air is really a problem for printing documents.

You're saying basically publishing, journalism, is responsible for air conditioning?

Yes, everybody can thank us, and then later they can blame us.

In the beginning, what air conditioning is doing is It's solving an industrial problem. The machines are hot, or maybe it's a textile mill and too much humidity is destroying your textiles. Also, you want your workers to be productive in these manufacturing spaces.

Lots of people in a small space with hot machines, right?

Yeah. In the very beginning of the 20th century, it's not about providing comfort for people.

It's about conditioning the environments that manufacturing and industry is happening.

Then it is this very long story that plays out over several decades where this invention moves from these industrial spaces into these other kinds of spaces.

Yes, you lucky people. Just sit back for a moment, relax, and notice the delightfully clean, cool, and refreshing atmosphere of this scientifically air-conditioned theater. Great, isn't it?

Then it comes into theaters and becomes almost this marketing tool to attract people inside.

You can enjoy great motion picture entertainment all summer long in cool comfort.

Go see a movie and enjoy air conditioning while you're in there.

Yes, low cost, all-season air conditioning is the right kind for you. And you're so right to choose a '55 Rambler cross country.

Now at all- And then at the same time, cars in America that have air conditioning in them, the share of those cars is rising and rising. It moves into office buildings.

Instead of traveling away from business and home to seek relief, you can obtain this same comfort right in your own home or office through air conditioning.

And then eventually, after decades of refining this technology, and it gets smaller, and it gets more affordable, and it becomes more advanced.

This lucky baby will sleep quietly through the night.

It reaches the American home, and we get the window unit.

This baby's RCA air conditioner will keep his room filled with cool, dry, fresh air.

The window unit is this much more affordable, portable, easy to pick up at the store, bring to your house.

You don't need to get a special installer. You stick it in your window, and now all of a sudden, you're getting all of these benefits of humidity-controlled, temperature-controlled air inside your home.

Humidity controlled, dust and pollen filtered. My indoor climate is always perfect.

At that point, it's off to the races. It takes over the American home. We can see in census data, for instance, that by about the start of the 1970s, about half of all new single-family homes that are built in America have air conditioning in them. The other thing that we see in census data at this time is that Americans themselves are starting to move to places that are really hot, like Florida, like Texas, like Arizona, like Nevada, places that were uninhabitable before air conditioning. Now they're booming in population. There was this wonderful editorial that was actually published in the Times in 1970 about the census that year, and how 1970 was like the air conditioning census. It refers to how air conditioning had become this really powerful influence for circulating people as well as air in this country.

This is a story that continues right up until this day, where air conditioning is extending its reach into every corner of the country, every housing type. Today, about two-thirds of American households in this country have central air, and about 90%, so 9 in 10 of them have some air conditioning if we include things like window units.

If we look just at new housing that's built in America today, looking back in 2023, about 98% of new single family homes in America had air conditioning.

What you're talking about is basically 200 or so million air conditioning units, condensers, boxes. That's a lot.

Yeah. As air conditioning has extended its reach into every corner of the country, into so many of the buildings where we spend time, I think it becomes clear that we've really engineered our modern lives entirely around it. Our reliance on this technology going forward is both unsustainable, and in fact, it's put a lot of people in a very vulnerable position.

We'll be right back.

Emily, walk us through how our reliance on air conditioning is both, as you just said, unsustainable and perhaps even dangerous to us.

The first obvious thing that it does is it just requires an enormous amount energy for so many people to be air conditioning so many spaces all the time. To think about this in a larger sense, our buildings in the United States are responsible for about 30% of the greenhouse gas emissions. That refers to the fossil fuels that we burn directly to heat and cool buildings and to cook in them, but also to generate the electricity that then allows us to do things like plug in our window units. There's a ton of energy use happening here, but part of what's also happening is that all of these buildings have been fundamentally mentally designed to consume lots of energy. A lot of these buildings were built during a time in the '50s and the '60s and in more recent years where energy was cheap. The idea that you're designing a building that demands lots of energy Who cares? We're not paying a ton of money for the energy. In the '60s and in the '50s, we weren't particularly thinking about whether or not using energy is going to cause climate change. Because of this, we get this glut of inefficient houses, and this happens not just with houses, but with everything in the built environment.

Think about strip malls, shopping centers, workplaces, even offices. This ubiquitous, tall, boxy, glass-covered office building that we think about in cities all over the country, all over the world. This is a building that is born out of the air conditioning age. That glassy box is designed around air conditioning such that without air conditioning, those kinds of offices don't make sense.

Right. I'm thinking about the office that you and I call home, the New York Times high-rise building in Midtown. That does not feel for all its virtues like a building you'd want to be in without air conditioning. No. It's glass and tall, and I think it'd be very hot.

When you think about tall glass office buildings, they're basically greenhouses if you're not controlling the air inside. They're designed such that not only do you not have to open a window in order to cool off, you couldn't open a window even if you wanted These buildings don't have windows that open because they're designed to be these hermetically sealed environments where we're going to keep the outside climate out and we're going to control the climate on the inside. This idea that the outside doesn't matter is true in the design of so many of our buildings, our offices, even our homes. That actually puts people into an incredibly vulnerable situation.

And vulnerable, how exactly?

Let's assume a storm comes through and the power goes out, or your air conditioning stops working because you've been running it all the time, all summer long, or when we have these extreme heat conditions and the electric utility tells you, Please try to preserve the amount of air conditioning that you're using. What happens when all of a sudden, millions of people who have been living in an environment designed entirely around air conditioning can't have that air conditioning. We start to see real problems. This is an abstract. We have actually seen this happen in the United States, even this year, in other recent years, where terrible storms have ripped through the state of Texas and millions of people have been left without power. When this happens in the middle of a heatwave, people die.

Right. That seems like an example of the multiple ways that air conditioning aspires to make us avoid contending with the realities of heat, to return to this idea you introduced earlier on, AC allows more people to go to a place like Texas than they'd ever go if there weren't AC making them comfortable, and to design and live in homes and offices that become a cauldron without air conditioning when it fails.

Exactly. I mean, air conditioning makes it possible for people to believe that you could be comfortable in Texas in the summer, in Arizona in the summer. People move to these places in large numbers. Then when the air conditioning fails, they're suddenly thrust into a world where they're living in the middle of the Arizona desert or they're living in the middle of Texas on a 110-degree day. That could be life-threatening.

Especially with climate change making it even hotter in these places, it doesn't really seem sustainable for a lot of people to live in those places without air conditioning, without some artificial tempering of the environment.

Yeah, and it's not just because of the heat. I mean, is it sustainable for a Metropolitan area of 5 million people to exist in Phoenix in the middle of the desert when there's also not enough water there for everyone? So air conditioning lulls people into moving moving to these places, which might be problematic for lots of other reasons as well. But we've convinced ourselves that the climate doesn't matter.

We're going to control it. We're going to engineer our way into living with it.

You're reminding me, Emily, of an episode we did on the show about this very idea. It focused on the water shortage in Arizona and the plans to pipe in, and as I recall, desalinate ocean water to deal with the problem of not enough water in Arizona. It doesn't really seem fathomable that that proposition would ever occur to people if they weren't living there in the comfort of air conditioning in the first place. Yes.

I mean, there have been people living in the region of Phoenix for centuries. It's not that nobody can ever live there. But what air conditioning does is it enables millions of people to live there who don't actually want to contend with 100 degrees temperatures all summer long. So a place like Phoenix then becomes this perfect example where we now have 5 million people living in the middle of the Arizona desert, and they all have this expectation of comfort there. That any environment that I move into in my home, in my office, in my car, I should be encased in this cooling, calm, 72 degrees a humidity-controlled environment. And that sense of comfort becomes so deeply entrenched culturally. And this isn't just about Phoenix, this is about all of us. I think we have set up an expectation or even an entitlement around comfort, such that it makes it really difficult to start to ask people, do you really need to turn up your air conditioning today?

That makes me wonder how people are ever going to get off the air conditioning hamster wheel that we're describing here? I mean, why would anyone?

Well, we have to figure out how to do something if we want to address climate change. There are a number of different things that are going to happen here. Air conditioning is going to become more efficient. We're going to have more renewable energy resources to power it in the future. I think we're increasingly going to see architects and builders trying to rediscover these lost ideas that we used to have about how to design buildings with the climate in mind, how to shade them, how to ventilate them in a more natural way. But I also have talked to some people who say that all of that is not going to be enough. One of them is Daniel Barber, who's an architectural historian who has thought a lot about life after air conditioning, or as he puts it, after comfort.

Life in a world where we're not depending on air conditioning so much.

The point that he makes is that there are difficult things and changes that we would have to do going forward. If we know that our buildings are responsible for a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, our dependents on air conditioning is responsible for a large share of that, and we have to reduce it in some way. What we all need to do is change our own behavior. We need to think a new about our relationship to comfort. Are we willing to be uncomfortable?

Some of the time.

Am I willing to wait until July to turn my air conditioning on? Am I willing to turn it off at night when it's not really necessary to use it?

Am I willing to sleep at 80 degrees instead of 72 degrees?

Or 68? Or 68 or 65. He's talking about asking people to do something really difficult. He is asking people to be uncomfortable.

You are, of course, Just by conveying this message, putting this problem on individuals, not governments, not states. Lots of people might hear this and think the real solutions have to come from regulators, have to come from institutions, have to come from the people who have a lot more control over how this all works.

I think that there are some ways in which that will happen, too. When we think about new buildings that are being designed or renovated today that are trying to adopt some of these techniques to be less reliant on indoor air conditioning, they're often institutional buildings. You will see cities commit to, when we rebuild our schools, when we build a new library, when we build a new civic center, we are going to embody these things that we are asking other people to do, too. Obviously, there are government incentives in the United States, for instance, to better insulate your home, to do things that would make your home greener. There's certainly a role for government. But what Daniel Barber, at least, would argue is that we all bear some responsibility. Air conditioning has lulled us into thinking that we're not impacted by how hot it is outside, but it's also maybe lulled us into thinking, I'm not the one who needs to particularly change my behavior in any way. But fundamentally, what we're talking about is people embracing a different cultural idea about what it means to be comfortable. The idea that existing in a room that is artificially cooled to 68 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit, that that's the ideal temperature.

That's not like some true fact about the human body. That's like a cultural idea that's been created over decades by the air conditioning industry, by architects and builders and culture and shopping malls and movie theaters. The idea that comfort means this one particular thing is an idea that we have constructed ourselves. What if we culturally came up with a different idea about comfort? What if more people came to accept the idea that going and sitting out on my front porch in the evening is where I get comfort from? It's also, by the way, how I interact with my neighbors, and I had stopped doing that when we were all retreating inside to air conditioning. What if we revive the idea that it's actually quite lovely in the summertime to sleep with an open window and to have fresh air? It's not impossible to change ideas about this because we created these ideas in the first place.

Well, Emily, thank you very much. We really appreciate it.

Yeah.

Thanks, Michael.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the White House said that its new found authority to use the Medicare program to negotiate prices of prescription drugs with pharmaceutical companies is likely to save taxpayers about $6 billion a year. That power came from President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which became law two years ago. Under it, regulators have now lowered the price of widely used treatments, including blood thinners and medications for arthritis and diabetes, some by up to 79 %. And both vice presidential nominees, Minnesota Governor Tim Walls and Ohio Senator JD Vance, have agreed to debate each other on October first during a televised face-off hosted by CBS News. That means there will be three debates before election day, one vice presidential debate, and two presidential debates between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Finally, remember to catch a new episode of The Interview right here tomorrow. This week, David Markezi speaks with the singer Jelly Roll about addiction, recovery, and putting his whole self into his music.

I think of everything as a going out of business sale, and I give everything I got, everything I do every time I do it right now.

Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lynn and Diana Wyn, with help from Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Devon Taylor, contains research help from Susan Lee. Original music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Rory Némistou, and Will Reid, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lantfer of Wunderly.YRLE. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bebarro. See you on Monday.