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

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    It’s a quiet force that contributes to a sameness across the country and to climate change.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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Paris, the Olympics Clean Up Their Act

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      How do you produce a global sporting event, with millions of people swooping down on one city, in the age of global warming?That is the test for the Paris Olympics this summer.The organizers say they’re putting the games on a climate diet. These Olympics, they say, will generate no more than half the greenhouse gas emissions of recent Olympics. That means tightening the belt on everything that produces planet-warming emissions: electricity, food, buildings, and transportation, including the jet fuel that athletes and fans burn traveling the world to get there.An event that attracts 10,500 athletes and an estimated 15 million spectators is, by definition, going to have an environmental toll. And that has led those who love the games but hate the pollution to suggest that the Olympics should be scattered around the world, in existing facilities, to eliminate the need for so much new construction and air travel. That’s why Paris is being watched so closely.It is making more space for bikes and less for cars. It’s doing away with huge, diesel-powered generators, a fixture of big sporting events. It’s planning guest menus that are less polluting to grow and cook than typical French fare: more plants, less steak au poivre. Solar panels will float, temporarily, on the Seine.But the organizers’ most significant act may be what they are not doing: They aren’t building. At least, not as much.Construction of bike lanes at Boulevard Haussman.Yulia Grigoryants for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More