The End of the Big Chill shows how indoor climate control is
colliding with an out-of-control outdoor climate. In
America, energy consumed by home air-conditioning, and the
resulting greenhouse emissions, have doubled in just over a
decade, and energy to cool retail stores has risen by
two-thirds. Now the entire affluent world is adopting the
technology. As the biggest economic crisis in eighty years
rolls across the globe, financial concerns threaten to shove
ecological crises into the background. Reporting from some
of the world’s hot zones—from Phoenix, Arizona, and Naples,
Florida, to inland Australia and southern India—Cox
documents the surprising ways in which air-conditioning
changes human experience: giving a boost to the global
warming that it is designed to help us endure, providing a
potent commercial stimulant, making possible an impossible
commuter economy, and altering migration patterns
(air-conditioning has helped alter the political hue of the
United States by enabling a population boom in the red-state
Sun Belt). While the book proves that the planet’s
atmosphere cannot sustain even our current use of
air-conditioning, it also makes a much more positive
argument that loosening our attachment to refrigerated air
could bring benefits to humans and the planet that go well
beyond averting a climate crisis. Though it saves lives in
heat waves, air-conditioning may also be altering our
bodies’ sensitivity to heat; our rates of infection,
allergy, asthma, and obesity; and even our sex drive.
Air-conditioning has eroded social bonds and thwarted
childhood adventure; it has transformed the ways we eat,
sleep, travel, work, buy, relax, vote, and make both love
and war. The final chapter surveys the many alternatives to
conventional central air-conditioning. By reintroducing some
traditional cooling methods, putting newly emerging
technologies into practice, and getting beyond industrial
definitions of comfort, we can make ourselves comfortable
and keep the planet comfortable, too.
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