When the houses in our neighborhood were built 40 years ago, none of them had air conditioning. It was a new development, trendy for its time, but no one thought back then that it was really necessary to have air conditioning in dry, cool Colorado.
After all, even on the hottest summer days, it was 20 to 30 degrees cooler at night. You could leave a window open in your bedroom and sleep comfortably. And that fresh, cool air would fill the house the next morning.
Then, about 20 years ago, our next-door neighbor had central air conditioning installed. We figured it was because he was from Iowa, where “warm” means “uncomfortable” because of the humidity.
Now the vast majority of our neighbors have central air. So do we. But we keep the thermostat at 78 degrees, and we still open our bedroom window at night.
Some people keep their summer thermostats where their winter thermostats should be — in the 60s. That seems to be especially true of large office buildings and big stores, where it’s possible to get goosebumps even when it’s like an oven outside.
Reflecting this comparatively recently developed intolerance for heat, America’s consumption of electricity now reaches its peak in the summer.
If we were still as adaptable to seasonal change as we were 40 years ago, maybe today we wouldn’t be so worried about global warming — for two reasons. First, and it’s shamelessly impolitic to suggest this, maybe a little extra heat wouldn’t seem so catastrophic.
But more important, we might not have spewed so much extra carbon dioxide into our atmosphere in selfish efforts to generate more electricity so we could keep ourselves artificially chilled in the summer.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t be doing everything we can to stop fouling our global nest. But maybe we shouldn’t expect too much, or panic and give up when nothing seems to be happening.
Forty years, coincidentally, is about how long it will take to see any effect from anything we do today to combat global warning, says Kevin Trenberth, a Boulder scientist whose work in this area won him a share of the Nobel Prize. He testified to the legislature last week in favor of a bill promoting large-scale solar-energy technology.
“It’s going to get much worse, no matter what we do, actually,” he told the Senate Local Government Committee. “By the end of this century, planet Earth will be a very different planet.” Even if we could put a dead stop to increasing carbon dioxide output, he said, temperatures still would rise 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
That might not seem such a bad thing after a Colorado winter that lacked its usual warm-between-the storms pattern. But Trenberth said the bad effects hit home in such things as huge swaths of beetle-killed pines.
The legislature is full of ironies. An hour before the solar energy bill was heard in committee, and just across the hall, the Senate Republican caucus heard a vigorous defense of coal as part of the energy-producing mix.
The United States has the world’s largest coal reserves, said Kelly Mader, a vice president of Peabody Energy Corp., and 50 percent of its electricity generation comes from coal. In China and India, he said, 3 billion people are “awakening” to the long-denied benefits of energy, and China is building coal-fired plants at a feverish pace.
“Where we are is where they want to be,” he said.
The question facing policy makers is where will we be in another 40 years?
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News. His column appears twice a month.
