Air conditioners and Climate Change

As the world gets warmer, air conditioning systems will be needed more and more so that people can live in more or less comfortable conditions. And something that in some countries today is a luxury, in a few years it will be something of strict necessity.

Just for information, today 90% of North American homes have air conditioning systems, while in India the percentage is 5%. But within a few years, India (and other countries) will need to buy hundreds of millions of air conditioners.

And all these devices have two characteristics: one is that they consume energy, and the energy that we consume today is mostly of fossil origin, and the other is that they work with fluorinated gases (HFCs) that are much more polluting than CO2. Therefore, the more devices there are, the more pollution we will generate.

But as air conditioners are increasingly necessary to live, the alternatives are few: better insulate our homes, make appliances more efficient and consume electricity of non-fossil origin.

Which is very easy to say and very difficult to achieve. And especially considering that we work against time.

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Improving the insulation of buildings is not very difficult to achieve. There are many materials that achieve this, and the insulation of already built buildings can be improved, and it has the advantage that insulation protects us from heat and cold, with which we save in winter and summer.

Today it is a “must” for new buildings, and many governments offer different types of aid to carry out this type of improvement in older buildings.

Paints have also been developed that reject solar radiation by reflecting ultraviolet rays, and generate a temperature difference of several degrees (about 8 degrees) between the outer and inner face. And I am sure that paints and materials of these characteristics will continue to be developed, to be applied to all types of buildings.

The air conditioning system invented by Carrier more than 100 years ago hasn’t changed much, but there have also been improvements in its efficiency. And today’s heat pumps are much more efficient than the air conditioners of before, and consume considerably less energy.

All these improvements together with the generation of electricity by non-polluting means (solar and wind power in particular), can make us improve the situation of people without increasing polluting emissions.

We will do it? The challenge is not easy, but we have no other way.