Cold Comfort Download PDF

After suffering through another summer of record-breaking heat, it’s time to rethink our century-old love affair with air-conditioning.

Before modern cooling machines enveloped civilization in frigid air, humans living in hot climes used all sorts of techniques to stay reasonably comfy. Egyptians fashioned homes with mud and stone. Domed mosques and temples in the Middle East and India funneled hot air upward. Dwelling in subterranean chambers kept denizens of Cappadocia in Turkey and Petra in Jordan from breaking a sweat. Some cultures draped water-soaked fabric over open windows; others topped their roofs with thatch or earth to diffuse heat. Roman emperors had their plebeians haul snow from distant mountaintops and pile it along palace walls. More recently, residents of America’s Deep South kept their homes airy with vaulted ceilings, spacious front rooms, wraparound porches, and picture windows.

Then, in the early twentieth century, a tenacious young engineer named Willis Carrier introduced us to the miracle of indoor climate control. Today, the company that Carrier founded earns $11.4 billion in annual sales, but its products, having revolutionized the way Americans live, remain the least efficient appliances in a typical household. They devour 16 percent of an average household’s annual energy tab, producing the equivalent of 2,290 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. “We’ve always taken air-conditioning for granted,” Gordon Holness, president of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), told me recently. “We’ve got into these lazy patterns because energy has been readily available and cheap. Now we’re realizing there isn’t an endless supply.” Continue reading →

Renewable Energy Catches On In Red America Download PDF

Kern County, California, went Republican by 18 points in the last election. Now it’s captivated by wind and solar power. Here’s why.

On a crisp, cloudless morning in November 2002, Susan Hansen stood atop California’s Cache Peak clutching a satchel containing the ashes of her husband, Homer. Susan, now 75, had reached the summit on a rock-strewn trail, climbing for an hour through scrub oak, bull pine, and juniper. The 6,676-foot-high Cache Peak, which protrudes from the Tehachapi Range about 40 miles east of Bakersfield, is situated almost wholly within the Hansen ranch.

Susan’s in-laws are also buried on the mountain. In 1946 they purchased the property—more than 50 square miles—from the Southern Pacific Railroad. “The first one up was my father-in-law,” Susan tells me when I visit her in December. “It took 12 people to carry his casket to the top, and we had to dynamite a hole in the rock for the grave.” After that fiasco, the family decided cremation would be easier. Once her in-laws had passed away, the Hansens divided up the property and sold their shares, except for Susan and Homer, who kept an 11,000-acre plot. There they started a cow-calf operation that at its peak had 1,000 head of cattle. Continue reading →

Selling the Sun Download PDF

A Man, A Plan, and the Dawn of America’s Solar Future

“I am a capitalist,” announces Jigar Shah, the 34-year-old founder of SunEdison. We have just sat down for dinner at a bustling noodle joint in Washington, D.C. Upon hearing Shah, who is wearing pressed khakis and a crisp blue oxford shirt, the couple at the next table nearly choke on their pad thai. A brash entrepreneur banging the capitalist drum isn’t going to win many friends here, especially now. It’s December, and a few blocks away congressional leaders are debating whether to give foundering automakers billions of dollars in bailout money. Ineptitude has ruined Detroit, greed has soiled Wall Street, and Democrats on Capitol Hill are counting the days until their guy steps into the White House.

But Shah can’t help himself. An iconoclast among greens, he’s a devoted environmentalist who champions market economics and believes American business acumen can conquer climate change. Shah has spent the past six years leveraging his convictions to build North America’s largest and most successful provider of solar energy. Continue reading →