Stan Cox at The Washington Post reports that the save-the-planet crowd wants Americans to stop using air conditioning:
In a country that's among the world's highest greenhouse-gas emitters, air conditioning is one of the worst power-guzzlers. The energy required to air-condition American homes and retail spaces has doubled since the early 1990s. Turning buildings into refrigerators burns fossil fuels, which emits greenhouse gases, which raises global temperatures, which creates a need for -- you guessed it -- more air-conditioning.
Big Government - as we have come to know it - is really an invention of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, but it didn't really take off until America's entry into World War 2. The demands of global war and massive domestic mobilization and industrialization required an enormous, year-round federal bureaucracy. Before then, Washington, D.C. pretty much shut down during the summer. The city was built partly upon swampland and the heat and humidity there during summer are atrocious. So members of Congress and much of their staffs fled the city after Memorial Day and did not return until after Labor Day.
Activist, Big Government is the natural result of year-round government. Congress's summer recess is now called the August recess, and it lasts this year from Aug. 9 - Sept. 10. A lot of the government does go on vacation then, but the staffs toil on. World War 2 made year-round government necessary. Air conditioning made it possible, though of course federal buildings did not get air conditioned all at once.
But federal buildings did start to get air conditioned in the 1930s at a high rate. Here is a blowup of a graph showing the penetration of mechanical cooling in federal buildings during FDR's administration through 1940, the second during the 1940s. All the source data is
found here.
The charts are a little unclear whether they refer to proportions of federal buildings converted to AC or the rate at which AC is added. I believe the former, since by the 1990s the charts hit the top line. Above, the top of the blue bars in the 1930s chart actually don't make it quite to halfway, this being a section of a larger chart.
Whichever the chart displays, the end of the war did not return us to part-time government. The increased power over the country seized during the war was to Congress and its staffers like catnip to cats. "The job of bureaucrats is to regulate," explained Steven Den Beste, "and left to themselves they will regulate everything they can." So the newly-enlarged bureaucracy was not at all willing to go gently into that good night, and didn't. After all, had not Big Government and large-organizational effectiveness beaten Hitler and Tojo? And now they would meet the challenge of demobilizing the armed forces and transitioning back to a peacetime economy.
And increasing air conditioning of federal buildings made permanent bureaucracies easily possible.
So, says the WaPo, the Tea Party people should unite to shun air conditioning.
Best of all, Washington's biggest business -- government -- is transformed. In 1978, 50 years after air conditioning was installed in Congress, New York Times columnist Russell Baker noted that, pre-A.C., Congress was forced to adjourn to avoid Washington's torturous summers, and "the nation enjoyed a respite from the promulgation of more laws, the depredations of lobbyists, the hatching of new schemes for Federal expansion and, of course, the cost of maintaining a government running at full blast."
Post-A.C., Congress again adjourns for the summer, giving "tea partiers" the smaller government they seek.
Yeah, as if. But the writer doesn't see the whole picture. In fact, the feds have been getting out of air conditioning at increasing rates, using new technologies and engineering to cool buildings without artificially cooling the air. The motive is not saving the planet but saving money. Much of the new designs are less cutting-edge breakthroughs, though, than using modern engineering and design to improve pre-1930s
design and architecture, "like architect Thom Mayne's design for an 18-story federal building in San Francisco that features windows that actually open and a perforated-metal "skin" that reflects the sun's heat and minimizes the need for air conditioning."
But even if this kind of design becomes widespread, nay, universal, it will not shrink the government as Mr. Cox fantasizes. Its iron grip on power and control is not a comfort issue, it is a political-philosophical,
even theological, issue.
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