How Air-Conditioning Made Us Expect Arizona to Feel the Same as Maine

One force has quietly shaped much of the world around us — our homes, our offices, the look of our cities, the migration patterns of Americans and the economic fortunes of different parts of the country.

That is: air-conditioning.

It’s become so widespread as to be unremarkable, an assumed feature of every interior environment. Nearly 90 percent of Americans use some kind of air-conditioning at home. It is humming in the background just about everywhere else you go: in your car, at the mall, on an airplane.

But, as we discuss in an episode of “The Daily” podcast today, our dependence on it increasingly poses a knotty problem, as the energy needed to power all this air-conditioning produces emissions that contribute to the warming world. The more we use the thing that helps us cope with heat, the hotter it will get.

“This cycle where air-conditioning is both the solution and the problem is really where we’re collectively kind of stuck,” said Daniel Barber, head of the school of architecture at the University of Technology Sydney.

Or, as he has written more bluntly: The comfort air-conditioning gives us inside is predicated on the worsening instability of the climate outside.

My colleagues Ronda Kaysen and Aatish Bhatia wrote about an illustration of this relationship on Monday. In some of the fastest-growing major metro areas in the U.S., like Las Vegas, the nights are rapidly getting hotter. That drives demand for even more air-conditioning. And in fact, without air-conditioning, it’s unlikely so many people would have moved to Las Vegas in the first place.