Pam Spaulding linked Shake’s Sis who linked Brad Plumer who got us all talking about the Alternet piece on the energy-hogging epidemic of American air-conditioning.
From Alternet via Brad (whose comment is in the middle):
The United States devotes 18 percent of its electricity consumption just to air-condition buildings. That’s more than four times as much electricity per capita as India uses per capita for all purposes combined. …About 5.5 percent of the gasoline burned annually by America’s cars and light trucks—7 billion gallons—goes to run air-conditioners. …
Fifty-six percent of refrigerants worldwide are used for air-conditioning buildings and vehicles. North America, with 6 percent of the world’s people, accounts for nearly 40 percent of its refrigerant market, as well as 43 percent of all refrigerants currently “banked” inside appliances and 38 percent of the resultant global-warming effects.
So air conditioning is destroying the planet. And the cherry on top:
Better insulation and ‘green’ energy can never be enough to satisfy the nation’s summer demand for A/C. Just to air-condition buildings—and do nothing else—would require eight times as much electricity from renewable energy as is currently produced.
Some Americans might sputter that they’d rather die than give up their A/C, and they may get their chance. But even for those of us willing to try and rethink our workplace to assist in slowing global warming (I almost typed climate change — damn you, GOP framers!), it feels like a daunting task.
I work in the University of Texas tower, and let me assure you that if there were no A/C, my 25th floor office would cook me into a tender morsel. I’m sure anyone who works in a communal space with lots of other people faces the same concern.
Still, for those lucky or unfortunate enough (depending on the lens through which you view it) to have some kind of office gig, this could be our chance to use existing technology to redesign professional culture as we know it. Imagine what we could push for over, say, the next 20 years…
We could ditch the workplace.
This one’s been coming for a long time anyway, but our communications and information-storage advances make it easy for an employee to be anywhere in the world while still fully connected to her/his office network. Video conferencing continues to improve, and soon, perhaps the notion that we need to be thrown into one big icebox together will become quaint.
We could work outside when it’s warm.
There are some cases where an office culture is probably preferred, and there might be some psychological benefits to having a workplace, as well. If so, why stay inside?
The proliferation of paper-based processes cooped up office-types for generations, but the digital age has rendered paper a convenience, and more often than not any existing paper procedures could be pushed online. A typical office could probably work under a large, airy tent with spartan, mobile workstations and fluid configurations.
Weather and other concerns would force us towards something practical, but with a floor and a modular roof of some kind, perhaps some netting around the outskirts for bugs, we’d be set to work in open-air spaces where possible. I bet even many existing buildings could be transformed into much airier places.
Of course, those of you in cooler climes would probably want a way to seal things back up for heating purposes. Hopefully, in 20 years we’ll actually remember what “cooler climes” feel like, but I’ll get our punkassengineers on this right away.
We could dress for the weather.
Again, if we’re talking about what to do without A/C in the warm summer months, give me the ability to wear a white t-shirt and open-toe shoes and I’m a much happier camper. Ditch even the business casual idea and just let us dress casually. I like to dress up at the right times, but the notion that one actually needs to dress for work like it’s church every single day seems a little old-school.
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If it came to it, we’d all get by. I think. But in the meantime, I’d like to remind all hotels, department stores, and movie theaters that there is such a number as 75 on your temperature control device. Feel free to explore the world of improved circulation and softer nipples at your convenience.
And yes, I know that the outdoor office may look more like this in 20 years:
I was just trying for a little optimism.
I thought the plan was to move to Mars, which is much colder and therefore will take a lot longer to heat up until it’s unliveable.
Another office worker saying a-freakin-men to ditching the workplace. Not only would it make cooling/heating inefficiently designed glass cube buildings obsolete, it would eliminate commuting. How much gas would that save?
To make the idea more palatable to our control-freak corporate overlords, perhaps the gummit could fling some huge tax breaks to companies that adopt liberal telecommuting policies.
I have no problem with your post & the possible solutions, altho getting there might be a trick, but I would like to point out this piece of nonsense in your quote:
can never ? really? well, hell, we might as well commit suicide en masse now. Shortage of available energy is really not going to be a problem for the next couple of billion years*, it’s simply capturing it that is the issue, and there is an enormous amount that can be done to capture it in nonpolluting fashion: windfarms, solar & water/tidal energy sources can produce vastly more energy than is being consumed globally now, provided only that we start building the damn things in time.
*unless Stricland is right & we get the whole lot in one big bang, of course.
Denmark gets 21% of its energy from wind. There is no reason the U.S. can’t either.
Passive A/C such as Solar Chimeys work fine.
I work in a lab, for my city’s municipal government. We test the drinking and wastewater, and cannot have an outdoor office situation… however, we also cannot have a freon based refrigerant system for the building. Something, I think, to do with the required air quality in the building. We also have many “little friends” around the lab (crickets, spiders, etc) because we cannot spray insecticides in the building. If the air quality isn’t high enough, then it will affect our testing.
Anyway, this becomes relevant to the discussion in that we have a cooling system in our building that doesn’t rely on any chemical refrigerant. Basically, it’s cooled by water being pumped down into the ground, to where it equalizes to ground temperature (somewhere in the 50 degree range, Fahrenheit) and then the water is run through coiled tubing and air is blown across it. We have a system for heating the water, rather than pumping it into the ground, in the winter.
I don’t know how much more energy efficient this is than standard air conditioning systems, but it, at least, doesn’t use the damaging chemical refrigerants. And it *works.* Often a little too well.