I survived the Heat Anomaly Event of June 2021 in the Pacific Northwest. Temperatures reached 116° here in Portland and over 120° in BC. All-time records. I survived it but not before being sent to the ICU. My old septuagenarian body didn't handle it well. Your article makes perfect sense to me.
The issue of short term extreme events has me considering looking for a property that I could use as a second/retirement home with a tiny house that could be completely off grid. I’ve been thinking about it for a while actually. My plan had already been to sell my house in Austin eventually since property taxes make it expensive to live here and I don’t have as much space as I’d like to grow more of my own food. I’ve always leaned towards doing things this way. I’m an oddball in a city of oddballs. Lowering my fossil fuel use more and more each month thanks to your other articles.
Anthony, your intentions are excellent: you're trying to offer practical solutions to an immediate crisis. However, as I pointed out, adding more AC units to the grid only increases the fossil fuel appetite, which increases the temperature. For the long term, AC actually makes our existential crisis worse.
We do need voices like yours to offer emergency guidelines. But without also speaking up about reducing fossil fuel consumption and thereby lowering that heat index, your advice will be merely a band aid on a severed aortic artery.
Wise prophets -- Noam Chomsky and others -- are calling out for immediate reduction of fossil fuel extraction. Let's stop producing SUVs and start doing what we should have done instead: build mass transit, the electric kind, as everyone else in the world has done or is doing. Duh? What's wrong with the USA? Greed and selfishness and corporate corruption. It's shameful. What you are actually doing by advocating more AC and generators, etc, is adding to the false narrative of conspicuous consumption, which is what caused this problem to begin with.
I need a backup electrical source and I thinking a window AC unit I storage as a backup in case my central goes out. I’m in Texas and when we had the deadly cold weather with grid failure in 2021 natural gas wasn’t a help. But when heat is the issue that supply would keep going so a standby natural gas general seems like my best option.
My house is 1000 sq Ft so not huge but not as small as your cabin. Rather than cool only part of it, I would probably end up taking in family and friends who didn’t plan ahead.
My south facing roof is tree shaded so solar isn’t a good option even though it’s what I would prefer. After an devastating ice storm this year there’s less shade now so perhaps an conversation with a solar company would be a good thing to check out anyway.
Thank you for the dire but yet hopeful articles. I subscribed for the year.
I survived the Heat Anomaly Event of June 2021 in the Pacific Northwest. Temperatures reached 116° here in Portland and over 120° in BC. All-time records. I survived it but not before being sent to the ICU. My old septuagenarian body didn't handle it well. Your article makes perfect sense to me.
The issue of short term extreme events has me considering looking for a property that I could use as a second/retirement home with a tiny house that could be completely off grid. I’ve been thinking about it for a while actually. My plan had already been to sell my house in Austin eventually since property taxes make it expensive to live here and I don’t have as much space as I’d like to grow more of my own food. I’ve always leaned towards doing things this way. I’m an oddball in a city of oddballs. Lowering my fossil fuel use more and more each month thanks to your other articles.
Anthony, your intentions are excellent: you're trying to offer practical solutions to an immediate crisis. However, as I pointed out, adding more AC units to the grid only increases the fossil fuel appetite, which increases the temperature. For the long term, AC actually makes our existential crisis worse.
We do need voices like yours to offer emergency guidelines. But without also speaking up about reducing fossil fuel consumption and thereby lowering that heat index, your advice will be merely a band aid on a severed aortic artery.
Wise prophets -- Noam Chomsky and others -- are calling out for immediate reduction of fossil fuel extraction. Let's stop producing SUVs and start doing what we should have done instead: build mass transit, the electric kind, as everyone else in the world has done or is doing. Duh? What's wrong with the USA? Greed and selfishness and corporate corruption. It's shameful. What you are actually doing by advocating more AC and generators, etc, is adding to the false narrative of conspicuous consumption, which is what caused this problem to begin with.
I need a backup electrical source and I thinking a window AC unit I storage as a backup in case my central goes out. I’m in Texas and when we had the deadly cold weather with grid failure in 2021 natural gas wasn’t a help. But when heat is the issue that supply would keep going so a standby natural gas general seems like my best option.
My house is 1000 sq Ft so not huge but not as small as your cabin. Rather than cool only part of it, I would probably end up taking in family and friends who didn’t plan ahead.
My south facing roof is tree shaded so solar isn’t a good option even though it’s what I would prefer. After an devastating ice storm this year there’s less shade now so perhaps an conversation with a solar company would be a good thing to check out anyway.
Thank you for the dire but yet hopeful articles. I subscribed for the year.