The evolution of cooling technology can be viewed as a parable of our unfolding climate catastrophe, David Owen writes.
A couple of years ago, in spring, my wife and I took our dog for a walk near Bantam Lake, in northwestern Connecticut, a few miles from our house. In swampy woods on the lake’s northern shore, we noticed a double row of lichen-spattered concrete pillars, each one four or five feet tall. The rows began at the edge of the water and extended maybe two hundred yards into the trees.
The end of ice harvesting on Bantam Lake, in 1929, corresponded with a rise in artificial ice production and the growing popularity of the household refrigerator.In temperate places, regularly using cold to preserve food first became practical in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when harvesters in Connecticut and elsewhere began packing lake and river ice in sawdust and shipping it as far away as India and Australia. Large-scale artificial production followed.
Refrigerators use compressors, condensers, and coils filled with volatile compounds to transfer heat from inside to outside; this same innovation made air-conditioning possible. When I was born, in 1955, air-conditioners in houses were rare; today, in almost all of the United States, they’re close to universal. My mother’s father stayed semi-comfortable during Kansas City summers in the thirties and forties by moving a bed into his screened porch and wearing seersucker suits to work.
The most widely embraced strategy for slowing the warming caused by cooling technology is to increase the energy efficiency of new refrigerators and air-conditioners. In a 2011the U.S. Department of Energy estimated that its new efficiency standards for refrigerators would “save the nation almost four and a half quadrillion BTUs over 30 years. That’s three times more than the total energy currently used by all refrigeration products in U.S. homes annually.
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