Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Oh no – poor people are getting richer, obtaining more access to modern conveniences.
Fast-Rising Demand for Air Conditioning Is Adding to Global Warming. The Numbers Are Striking.
With window units set to more than triple by 2050, home air conditioning is on pace to add half a degree Celsius to global warming this century, a new report says.
Phil McKenna
BY PHIL MCKENNANOV 12, 2018
Increasing demand for home air conditioning driven by global warming, population growth and rising incomes in developing countries could increase the planet’s temperatures an additional half a degree Celsius by the end of the century, according to a new report by the Rocky Mountain Institute.
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The problem with air-conditioning comes from two sources: the amount of energy used, much of which is still powered by carbon-emitting coal, oil and gas generation, and the leaking of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) coolants, which are short-lived climate pollutants many times more potent than carbon dioxide.
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Air conditioning, and homes themselves, will also have to become more energy efficient. To ramp up efforts to bring down emissions from cooling, RMI joined the government of India, British entrepreneur Richard Bransonand other organizations on Monday in launching the Global Cooling Prize, an effort to spur development of highly efficient cooling technology to reduce further warming from the residential air conditioning sector.
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Growth in the demand for air conditioning is already outpacing growth in solar power, with new residential air conditioning units worldwide consuming approximately 100 GW of energy in 2017, compared to 94 GW of new solar energy generation.
“You can’t build enough renewable energy fast enough to keep pace with the growth of air conditioning,” said Iain Campbell, a senior fellow with RMI and lead author of the report.
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The RMI report also describes other measures to shift to less polluting cooling, including improving energy efficiency in homes and buildings and providing financing, subsidies, and other financial incentives to reduce upfront costs for consumers.
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The RMI Report is available here. The report suggests that “… increasing populations and urbanization, and rising temperatures exacerbated by expanding urban heat-islands,1 cooling is, in many parts of the world, no longer a luxury, but an urgent priority for health and well-being, productivity, and in extreme cases, survival. …
If only there was a scalable, low carbon energy source which could produce the vast amounts of reliable electricity required to satisfy the world’s growing power demands.
This article completely misses the impact of increased efficiency as the vast fleet of EXISTING A/C units is replaced. The latest generation features variable speed compressors that can reduce energy consumption by half. The average life of a central air system is 12 to 15 years, while window units average ten. With two or three replacement cycles by 2050, we should expect efficiency to quadruple so that a tripling of the number of units by then should result in a net reduction in the total energy consumed.
“we should expect efficiency to quadruple”
Are current AC:s really below 25% efficiency? Or are you expecting them to turn in into generators?
If you had done some research, you would know it’s worse than that. Typical home A/C systems operate at about 10% of maximum theoretical efficiency.
There’s lots of room for improvement. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_energy_efficiency_ratio
Yet again the idiots don’t know the difference between power and energy.
“100 GW of energy”
It’s the wealth effect, and it’s all the fault of evil fossil fuels. Relatively cheap, easily available electricity as well as fuels for manufacturing and transport have raised, and continue to raise living standards worldwide. As people become wealthier, or at least, less poor, they (shocker) use more energy. But the Green Meanies don’t want that. They want poor people to stay poor, and to die earlier. They need to have higher rates of people dying, especially older or sicker people, due to hyperthermia. Then, they can say “See? Global warming!” Even though it’s just weather, which they know, but sheeple tend to believe it anyway. They turn a blind eye to people dying from hypothermia in winter because they can no longer afford to heat their homes properly, due to “green” energy forcing energy costs to skyrocket. Because that’s how they roll.
by Eric Worrall
“HA”, ….. the big problem with “blue sky dreaming” is that some grinch always wakes you up. 😊 😊
I recall reading about how much electricity is consumed by computers, servers, main frames etc. some years ago. In the US, these devices consume about 10% of the nation’s electricity output. Maybe we should ban computers, eh?
“some years ago”
Don’t be fergettin that “some years ago” the electrical components used by computers and their peripherals required horrendous amounts of power compared to the components used now days.
Fer instance, …… revolving RAM storage ….. verses …. silicon chip RAM storage.
The only reason I don’t have air conditioning in Johannesburg’s current 34C degree spring, is that I don’t have a free bit of internal wall to put the outlet! OK, SA’s Eskom is broke, running out of coal, and running its OCGT’s more-or-less continuously – but then some comrade or other has a long-term contract for oil, so THAT’S all right!
Catastrophic global cooling by
leaking of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) coolants, which are short-lived climate pollutants
because of Catastrophic global warming by climate coolants:
https://goo.gl/images/LyLfCz
compared to Slavic / Anglo Saxon! / deities
Three Heads Svarog, Perun and Svetovid or Veles
https://goo.gl/images/9Vxbeu