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.
Thanks Michael... sorry to hear about the problem you had with the heat, but that is exactly the problem I am talking about. People really need to be ready to survive this.
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.
Connie, thanks for reading and commenting. As I see it, there are two problems here--one is solving the climate change problem by getting to carbon 350 or less. The other is surviving the mess we have already created, especially the extreme events that we don't expect. In this article, I am writing about the latter. If an extreme heat event occurs, everyone will need some way to cool down or they will perish. I can only see three ways to do that: get into cool water, go to an underground dwelling for a time, or cool the dwelling you have. Most people don't have the options of the first two, so that leaves cooling, and the only way we can do that is with AC.
Let me be clear: AC is no answer for climate change. But when temperatures soar to 120F or 130F, people are going to need it to survive.
I have written extensively elsewhere about solutions to climate change and how to get to carbon 350. Unfortunately, it won't be by reducing consumption or "leaving it in the ground." The IPCC says we need to reduce emissions by 76% to get to carbon 350. If you want to do that by reducing consumption, it means you are talking about reducing consumption by 76%. That will never happen. Such a reduction would result in a catastrophic collapse in the real economy, and people simply will not do it. A sudden end to fossil fuels without a viable alternative means we cannot heat homes, grow and distribute food, get to work, power businesses, etc. One may call that greedy and selfish, but most people see a warm home, food, and decent employment as necessary to survival.
No doubt that certain lifestyle reductions will help, but as I have written elsewhere, the most effective and realistic way to get to carbon 350 is simple but difficult--electrify all of our energy needs and produce all of the electricity without carbon. The simple slogans mocking as solutions simply replace the climate catastrophe with an economic one. If we think we prefer the economic catastrophe, read the history of the great depression (a mere 35% reduction in total consumption) or those of the horrible famines around the world. Those are catastrophes of the real economy. We can produce one of those now by choice, or we can survive, keep working to solve the systemic issue of climate change, and hope for better. People are likely to continue choosing the latter.
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.
Hi Beth! Thank you for reading and for subscribing! Much appreciated. You have experienced in Texas some of what I am talking about--short, extreme, out-of-character events that we need to survive. If solar is possible, it is likely the best way to provide the back up power, but that's not an option for everyone. I've been researching some battery-driven options for smaller homes like yours and mine, and I expect to write more about that soon.
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.
Thanks Michael... sorry to hear about the problem you had with the heat, but that is exactly the problem I am talking about. People really need to be ready to survive this.
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.
Connie, thanks for reading and commenting. As I see it, there are two problems here--one is solving the climate change problem by getting to carbon 350 or less. The other is surviving the mess we have already created, especially the extreme events that we don't expect. In this article, I am writing about the latter. If an extreme heat event occurs, everyone will need some way to cool down or they will perish. I can only see three ways to do that: get into cool water, go to an underground dwelling for a time, or cool the dwelling you have. Most people don't have the options of the first two, so that leaves cooling, and the only way we can do that is with AC.
Let me be clear: AC is no answer for climate change. But when temperatures soar to 120F or 130F, people are going to need it to survive.
I have written extensively elsewhere about solutions to climate change and how to get to carbon 350. Unfortunately, it won't be by reducing consumption or "leaving it in the ground." The IPCC says we need to reduce emissions by 76% to get to carbon 350. If you want to do that by reducing consumption, it means you are talking about reducing consumption by 76%. That will never happen. Such a reduction would result in a catastrophic collapse in the real economy, and people simply will not do it. A sudden end to fossil fuels without a viable alternative means we cannot heat homes, grow and distribute food, get to work, power businesses, etc. One may call that greedy and selfish, but most people see a warm home, food, and decent employment as necessary to survival.
No doubt that certain lifestyle reductions will help, but as I have written elsewhere, the most effective and realistic way to get to carbon 350 is simple but difficult--electrify all of our energy needs and produce all of the electricity without carbon. The simple slogans mocking as solutions simply replace the climate catastrophe with an economic one. If we think we prefer the economic catastrophe, read the history of the great depression (a mere 35% reduction in total consumption) or those of the horrible famines around the world. Those are catastrophes of the real economy. We can produce one of those now by choice, or we can survive, keep working to solve the systemic issue of climate change, and hope for better. People are likely to continue choosing the latter.
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.
Hi Beth! Thank you for reading and for subscribing! Much appreciated. You have experienced in Texas some of what I am talking about--short, extreme, out-of-character events that we need to survive. If solar is possible, it is likely the best way to provide the back up power, but that's not an option for everyone. I've been researching some battery-driven options for smaller homes like yours and mine, and I expect to write more about that soon.