Us in the US
US 24
Our furlough in the US ran to almost six weeks. It was primarily a family reunion, to spend time with our son in Chicago. He took a week off, which we spent in Montana, in and around the Glacier National Park. Later, we took a busman’s holiday, attending JLF, my company’s literary events, in New York and Boulder.
My earlier intent was to write a free-flowing travelogue of my time in the US, but that would run to several columns worth of writing, and I suspected my innate laziness would use that as an excuse to take a few weeks to turn that out. Instead, I decided to put out a series of stand-alone posts. I’m hoping I can do this at a higher frequency than one a week, to make up for my self-indulgence since mid-August. Here are the first two:
Heat is Predatory
Turn on the Air Con
“Heat is a predatory force”, Jeff Goodell* began his talk on global warming at the Boulder Public Library last week. Outside, the September sun of Colorado was harsh, and bare-bodied runners glistened with sweat. But the indoor air of our venue was chilled, and I was glad for the jacket I had stuffed into my back-pack.
The American attitude towards air-conditioning is like the Punjabi attitude to bling - “If you have it, flaunt it”, and thermostats are routinely set to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, or 21 degrees Centigrade. At home, my wife protests if I dial the remote setting down to 24.
“Coming to the US turned my puritanical switch on”, I remarked to Jeff in the Q&A that followed his talk. Most such talks focus on government responsibility, politics, big oil, etc. But, what about personal responsibility, I asked. The average Indian puts under 2 tons of Carbon dioxide (CO2) into the air every year. The average American, 17 tons.
Two hours out of Chicago, an older friend of my son’s had driven us to his home on Lake Geneva, where his family spends the summer. With school and college back in session, they had now moved back to their suburban home, and the summer home was empty when we walked in, by way of the garage and the laundry room. Empty, but cool with the crisp air of central air-conditioning. In winter, the climate control system flips to heat, and a dehumidifier ensures against damp building up in the basement. “Thanks to my Nest controller, I can control the temperature settings here without leaving my office”, Xerxes told us.
US homes are getting larger by the year; from just over 2000 square feet at the turn of the century, the average home size peaked at 2467 square feet in the middle of the last decade. In every home or apartment I visited, climate control systems are always on, across the entire dwelling unit, whether the residents are at home or not, gathered for dinner, or dispersed in their individual private spaces.
“Do you turn the air-conditioning off when you leave Chicago?” I asked my son in his tiny downtown apartment. He doesn’t. Nor the heating. Always On is the US norm.
“We’re addicted to comfort”, Jeff Goodell said in response to my intervention. Comfort is the lodestar of human striving - soft bed sheets, quiet cars, cushioned shoes, above all, a home shielded against the elements. A Christmas scenery of fir trees and snow drifts is utterly romantic, but best viewed through a picture window, with a fake fireplace burning gas in the living room.
Personal responsibility for the globe will not be a motive force for change. After the session, I spoke to Jeff about the nature of consumption. The 1% are responsible for 60% of carbon emissions, he said. Implicit in his tone was that he is not part of the 1%. It’s always someone else who is to blame, and someone else who has to set it right.
And they will. We will, through technology, which is one form of collective human enterprise. When affluence threatened London streets with rivers of horse-shit, automobiles displaced carriages. When car exhausts blanketed Los Angeles with a blanket of smog, catalytic converters kicked in. Gas furnaces replaced coal fires, and heat-pumps promise even more efficient heating.
As the world warms, and the locus of economic growth continues to shift east and south, to Asia and Africa, it will be air-conditioning - more than heating - that will demand ever more energy. The IEA (International Energy Association)* writes
"of the 3.5 billion people who live in hot climates, only about 15% owned AC in 2021, with even lower ownership levels in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia”. Air-conditioning, the IEA asserts, saves lives.
When you cool buildings, you heat the external environment. And that’s even without accounting for the heat and smoke generated at the power plants that spin the turbines that drive the electric grid. This could sound like a doomsday prophecy - heat demands cooling, which generates more heat, in a spiral unto death.
But how hot is the globe? If you google for an answer to this question, you will encounter chart upon chart showing how much the world has warmed, as a result - presumably - of carbon emissions. It took me several tries before I found the number I wanted: even after several decades of climate change, the average temperature of the globe is 15 degrees Centigrade*. That’s pretty cool; cooler than even the most chilled of American summer homes. In Europe and the US, extreme cold kills a lot more people than extreme heat.
Heat is predatory; cold, more so. A night sleeping outdoors in a Chicago winter will kill you, without question. A day labouring in the Delhi sun? Not pleasant, and we have to find ways of making work less manual, but it’s not yet deathly for most. There are good reasons why warm regions host larger populations than cold. The technology of fire kept the predator of cold at bay. As the world warms, technologies of cooling will have to be more widely adopted, if we rule out massive migration.
Cooling or warming, the individual’s quest for comfort will drive us to consume more energy, rather than less. Long-distance truck drivers in India should have air-conditioned cabs, and my village neighbours in Kumaon will want heated homes. When it comes to energy consumption, I am definitely in the global 1%, so I will not preach abstemious behaviour to anyone else, and will restrict my puritanical impulses, such as they are, to myself.
I’m all for solar energy, and electric cars. Even for those ugly beasts that spin power from the wind. We need better insulated homes, and more efficient air conditioning. Despite all these developments, we will need more power plants for industry and comfort in the global south, and for AI in the global north.
Among the few pieces of good news I read this morning is that the Three Mile Island nuclear project will restart soon, to supply carbon-free power to Microsoft data centers. In the atomic explosion that he triggered in the American desert, Robert Oppenheimer saw Death, the destroyer of worlds. But in Kalpakkam, and in Three Mile Island, I see Energy, the promise of better lives.
Jeff Goodell at JLF Colorado:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Goodell
IEA on air-conditioning:
The earth’s temperature:
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/solar-system-temperatures/
Re-starting Three Mile Island:
A Global Shortage of Beauty
Avalanche Lake, Montana
Let’s hike to Avalanche Lake, Kedar proposed for our first day at Glacier National Park. He wasn’t the first to have the thought. By the time we reached the bottom of the trail, the parking lots were full. Drivers had wedged their cars into corners that were never designed for parking, and after threading slowly through the bylanes of the campsite, we reconciled ourselves to turning around.
We found parking two and a half kilometers back down the road. Once you factored in a stroll along the lakefront, the ten km. hike we’d planned had swollen to almost twenty, a bit like my toes, not quite used to the new trekking shoes I’d just bought in Chicago.
The next morning, we left home at six, to beat the lines at the park entrance. By eight, all the parking at Logan Pass was taken; luckily, there were few takers for the hike we’d planned, along St. Mary’s Lake, and we were spoiled for parking choice. We met few hikers on our way down to the lake, and on the sweaty trudge up to Virginia Falls, but by the time we’d turned around, it was one-way-only across the wooden bridges, and all the stone perches overlooking the lower waterfalls were taken.
The traffic back over Logan Pass, and down to the park entrance, was bumper-to-bumper, and though there was no taking away from the breath-taking beauty of Glacier National Park, this was not wilderness. I don’t know whether I still have the knees for true wilderness, and it’s been almost five years since I camped on a high meadow, but from what I hear, even in the more remote reaches of the Himalaya, it’s tough to find untrodden trails.
Is there some kind of snobbery in being, or having been, in places where few had gone? In having been, I think so. In the recounting of a winter trek to Gaumukh, where it felt like Chari and I had the entire upper Ganga Valley to ourselves, or even in a family holiday to Manali in the sixties, when my father often slowed the car to allow herds of sheep to thread around the car, their bells plangent against the soft murmur of the Beas:
“Oh we were there when there were so few people”, carries more than an element of boasting.
But in the being, in the intensity of that solitary immersion in nature, there was a liberation into another state, windows into wonder that I find difficult to nudge open when other trekkers crowd the trail, or other cars honk if you stop to admire the view.
At Boulder, Pico Iyer talked about the paradox of tourism. A pilgrim is also a tourist, different only in intent. He occupies the same seat on a train, the same space on a trail. And when the pressure of millions, whether pilgrim or tourist, alters the very nature of the beauty they seek to experience, we have to find the collective wisdom to step back. The essential experience of Japan, the Japan that he made home, lay in the composure of its people. But when its trains are occupied by people who talk loudly, and slouch - like me, he said, though he doesn’t - Japan changes.
Across the world, the magnets of tourism are protesting change. The people of Bali are pressing the federal government* to ban new construction at tourism hotspots, Venice, many parts of Greece* are hiking tourist fees, and closer home, environmental activists are urging curbs on religious tourism in Garhwal.
It sounds a bit weird to say this, but it seems like there is a shortage of beauty around the world, and everyone wants a bit of it. My half-baked response is to say - only to myself - go create your own. We have a small piece of nature in our mountain backyard, and perhaps I should dedicate some part of my later years into making it into a place, not just of beauty, but also of contemplation.
Bali:
https://www.ft.com/content/456d4990-52c8-4b05-9bd3-8934dc6f2370?shareType=nongift
Greece:
https://www.ft.com/content/914124cb-19d6-4884-b717-5ad48efcb64c?shareType=nongift
Japan and India are both very densely populated countries. In one, the coping mechanism was chaos, disrespect and disorder. In the other, it is extreme politeness and regard for the other.
Upon checking a few years back, I realized that the long haul flights that we took far outstripped our carbon footprint elsewhere. Reduced ac, lights, car use made a scratch on our carbon footprint, not quite a dent.
Since I do enjoy travelling 2 or 3 times a year, I have not been able to figure out how to be suitably abstemious. I live and will die with this guilt.
Also, have stopped going to out of the way destinations, especially in India where regulations are so lax, because I can't reconcile going there myself and then complaining "oh, we are destroying the Himalayas with over tourism". Again, I conundrum that I have not been able to solve.
Good read. Thank you.