I read a review of a new book called The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, highlighting the death toll already claimed by excessive heat and urging people to wake up and do things to mitigate it immediately. One of the topics that caught my attention was air conditioning, because this thought had occurred to me many times: it’s ironic that the way we keep ourselves cool plays a significant role in making our world hotter. The author thinks that air conditioning is a “technology of forgetting”—a technology that allowed us to forget things that our predecessors had figured out well, over a long period of time. Mostly, that means elements of architectural design.
Heating and cooling
Heating and cooling
Heating and cooling
I read a review of a new book called The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, highlighting the death toll already claimed by excessive heat and urging people to wake up and do things to mitigate it immediately. One of the topics that caught my attention was air conditioning, because this thought had occurred to me many times: it’s ironic that the way we keep ourselves cool plays a significant role in making our world hotter. The author thinks that air conditioning is a “technology of forgetting”—a technology that allowed us to forget things that our predecessors had figured out well, over a long period of time. Mostly, that means elements of architectural design.