As Air Conditioning Use Grows, Are We Cooling Our Way to a Hotter World?

By: By Terrell Johnson

Published: August 30,2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images

A young girl eats an ice lolly next to an air conditioning unit in Shanghai, China, on July 16, 2013.

No other country uses as much energy for air conditioning today as the United States. And it isn't difficult to understand why, especially in a summer when devastating heat waves have swept through the Midwest, forcing school closings in some states.
But that's changing quickly as developing nations – especially in the most populous and hottest parts of the world – seek to enjoy the advantages of modern life, particularly one that makes life indoors more comfortable, helps people by more productive at work and can even save lives during periods of intense heat.
That's worrying scientists who note that the energy required to meet the demand for cooling across the developing world could go up dramatically, and would likely be generated by some of the dirtiest sources of electricity.
"Should the world eventually adapt the U.S. level of the need for cooling, energy demand for air conditioning would be equal to about 50 times the current demand for cooling in the U.S.," Michael Sivak, a research professor at the University of Michigan, told the Christian Science Monitor.
Sivak published a study in the most recent issue of American Scientist that explores what is likely to happen to energy consumption in the developing world as personal incomes rise: "an unprecedented increase in energy demand," he says.
Asia's biggest and most rapidly developing countries offer some of the most compelling examples of the rapid growth of air conditioning, he explains. In China, the percentage of households that owned an air conditioner back in 1990 was just 1 percent. By 2003, that number had jumped to 62 percent; in 2010, more than 50 million air conditioning units were sold there nationwide.
The numbers in neighboring India are also telling. Were Mumbai, whose population of roughly 20 million makes it India's largest city, to reach the same level of usage as the United States -- where about 87 percent of households are equipped with air conditioning -- it would generate about a quarter of the demand of the entire U.S.
The country as a whole –India is home to more than 1.2 billion people – had only about a 2 percent adoption rate as recently as 2007. Six years later, air conditioning sales across India are estimated to be growing by roughly 20 percent every year.
Why is this so concerning? Because in developing countries, as Stan Cox of the nonprofit Land Institute writes at Yale University's Environment360, the likeliest source of energy to power all those new air conditioners is coal, among the cheapest and most plentiful sources of energy on Earth.
It's also among the dirtiest, as coal-fired power plants are one of the biggest contributors of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, adding about 80 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions generated by the electricity sector every year.
Even though some U.S. cities have taken steps to curb energy usage from air conditioning – in 2008, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a law that bans the city's retail storefronts from blasting cool air onto the sidewalks to entice passersby – it continues rising rapidly in this country too.
Since 1993, the amount of electricity consumed for air conditioning has risen by nearly 40 percent nationwide but nowhere more than the Southeast, which added more (and bigger) housing units in the past 15 years than any other region of the country, according the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The rise in air conditioning across the developing world mirrors what has been happening in the American South for the past few decades, Cox added in his interview with the Christian Science Monitor. "I grew up in Georgia, and throughout my childhood A/C was taking off there," he said.
"It seemed almost like magic at the time, but gradually ... I started thinking about the feedback loop," he added, because air conditioning "is burning so much fossil fuel, especially coal, which is helping to ensure the greater need for air conditioning in the future."