RUSH: Okay, folks. “Is Air-Conditioning Killing the Planet?” Discovery.com. Do you know, there’s a lie that has just been reported and been accepted by… Well, I don’t know how many, but everybody on the left has accepted it without question, and that is that the first six months of this year are the hottest on record? It’s not the hottest ever because we don’t know. We weren’t keeping records back when the meteors destroyed the dinosaurs. But, so far, 2015, the hottest year ever, and it’s just been blindly accepted.
So we have accompanying stories. I saw last night, somebody — some environmentalist wacko at some website somewhere — put together a graphic of what the United States will look like in 50 years. Of course, in 50 years, the entirety of the Northern Hemisphere and North Pole melts. The entirety. Oh, I know! It was one of my tech blogs. They buy this stuff hook, line, and sinker. Just incredible. And of course there was no New York. There was no Washington. There was no Boston. Florida was in the Bahamas as its own island.
They just eat this up, regurgitate it, believe it, without even questioning it. Hottest year on record! Never mind all the frigid temperatures this past winter, even in 2014. Anyway, it starts out here like this: “Americans are sweltering this week and mid-summer temperature maps are covered in big belts of red and dark red. In fact, the US Energy Information Administration forecasts that the typical US home will use an average of 1,044 kilowatt-hours per month this summer, 3.7% higher than the same period last year because there are more ‘summer cooling degree days.’
“But the solution to staying cool by cranking up the air-conditioning has a dark side: the energy it uses also happens to be a big contributor to climate change.” Now, couple of pull quotes. But hang on, because I’m gonna just nuke this. I’m just gonna blow this sky-high with two different examples, two different points. But first: “Stan Cox, an analyst at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and author of the book ‘Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World.’ …
“‘If we are going to have to decide that there are some technologies that are not necessities, maybe we can do without some of them,’ Cox said. ‘Until a half-century ago a/c was not a necessity, maybe we should think about that again.'” You notice all of these global warming people want to roll back progress in the name of progress? Have you ever stopped to think about if these people ever do win the day, the amount of progress that gets canceled out and rolled back? “As global temperatures rise over the next few decades…”
No question about it, you see?
“[T]he demand for cooler buildings will only get worse, according to study published in May by Davis in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at the rise in air conditioning in Mexico. ‘We describe both how electricity consumption increases with temperature given current levels of air conditioning, and how climate and income drive air-conditioning adoption decisions,’ the study concluded. ‘We then combine these estimates with predicted end-of-century temperature changes to forecast future energy consumption.
“‘Overall, our results point to air-conditioning impacts being considerably larger than previously believed.'” Now, air-conditioning was invented by a man named Carrier. He’s got a dome named after him in Syracuse, the Carrier Dome. I don’t know if you ever stop to think about A/C. I do think about these things, ’cause I can’t imagine life without it. Now, only a short portion of my life did our family not have it. But I tell you, when it creeps into my mind is, strangely enough, during baseball season.
I think of these guys that play Major League Baseball — well, any baseball — prior to the years prior to air-conditioning and they wore these flannel uniforms, and they traveled on un-air-conditioned trains and buses, locker rooms in that era. Nothing was. I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine it. I’m so far into this, I wonder what people did in biblical times before there was ice. In the Middle East, where do you go to get a cold bottle of water, or drink of water? What do you do?
But they didn’t know any difference as the people in the 1930s and forties did not know any different so it just was what it was. You can find pictures of corporate execs back in the thirties and forties wearing vests and long-sleeved shirts with ties and suit jackets and so forth in the middle summer, during the middle of the business day, in an office building on the 12th floor. They just did it. But the air-conditioning revolution made parts of the country that were uninhabitable during summer habitable, I mean, with a productive sense behind it.
The productivity, the economic growth, the longevity, the health advances that were all a product of air-conditioning? It’s unfathomable, the technological advancement air-conditioning is, or was, because people today who’ve never lived without it cannot imagine what life without it was. Go back a little further to when there was no real refrigeration. Refrigeration and air-conditioning, particularly central air-conditioning, made such incalculable differences in economic advancement and growth.
I look at these clowns wanting to roll it back, get rid of it and blame it? Now, let me tell you something, folks. And listen. This is this is this is irrefutable. If you want to reduce energy use — if you are a dunderhead that thinks your thermostat is largely to blame for global warming or climate change or whatever current nomenclature they attach to the so-called issue. But if you think you are one who needs to cut back on energy in order to save the planet, you know where you’d better cut back?
It’s not air-conditioning.
Not by a long shot.
If we really want to save energy in a whole bunch of ways, we’ve gotta stop heating our homes. The amount of energy that it takes to heat homes all over the world (this country included) in winter, dwarfs the amount of energy that is required to cool buildings, rooms, what have you. The secret of that is all found in the temperature the differential. When it is 95 outside or 85 outside, it takes a certain amount of energy to make it 72 inside. When it’s 10 degrees outside — 15 degrees, 20, 30 degrees outside — and you want the room to be 72?
Do you realize how much more energy it takes to keep a room at 72 degrees when it’s 30 outside than it is when it’s 85 outside? It’s a big difference heating a home from 30 degrees to 72, than cooling one from 85 to 72. It’s not even close. Then you add to that fact, not everybody has air-conditioning. There are a lot of people in America who do not have it. There are a lot of climates where it’s not installed, central air-conditioning. There are a lot of places where people still can’t afford it.
They might have a room or two air-conditioners. But central air-conditioning, they don’t have. But everybody has to heat your house or you’re gonna die in the winter, everybody has to have heat, and everybody that has it uses it. It’s not even close. So what is this attack on air-conditioning? Well, as always the case, it’s not about climate change. That’s just the vehicle. It’s about control. It’s about punishment. It’s about suffering. There’s so much garbage wrapped up in this. It’s about the rejection of technological advancement.
It’s about the rejection of progress. Not just the rejection, it’s about blaming progress, blaming technology, blaming these things, and ultimately blaming an advanced lifestyle. You know what this is really about? “It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair the United States has all this. It isn’t fair that we have it and that we use so much more than our ‘share’ of the world’s energy to make ourselves comfortable. There are so many people in the world that don’t have enough food and don’t have enough heat, don’t have to enough air-conditioning, don’t have enough water!
“We are selfish, and we are mean, and we are thieves, and everything we have we have stolen from the poor people of the world, and it’s time we understood what a hard life is really like because we’ve seen stolen everybody else’s good life.” That’s the way the corrupt, perverted liberal mind works. But this business about air-conditioning being blamed for climate change? The amount of energy used in air-conditioning doesn’t come close to the amount of energy used heating, and no matter how you slice it.
Have you ever heard of the government getting subsidies for air-conditioning use? They give subsidies for heating, don’t they? I mean, every winter, we have people who get them We get the sob stories, people in Boston gonna freeze, don’t have to enough heating oil, can’t afford it, what have you, ’cause they need it. You die without it. But nobody gets air-conditioning subsidies. I’m sure there are some welfare recipients that do, but I mean not to the extent that we subsidize home heating.