Losing Our Cool

Losing Our Cool
Author :
Publisher : The New Press
Total Pages : 273
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781595586025
ISBN-13 : 1595586024
Rating : 4/5 (024 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Losing Our Cool by : Stan Cox

Download or read book Losing Our Cool written by Stan Cox and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Losing our Cool shows how indoor climate control is colliding with an out-of-control outdoor climate. In America, energy consumed by home air-conditioning, and the resulting greenhouse emissions, have doubled in just over a decade, and energy to cool retail stores has risen by two-thirds. Now the entire affluent world is adopting the technology. As the biggest economic crisis in eighty years rolls across the globe, financial concerns threaten to shove ecological crises into the background. Reporting from some of the world's hot zones—from Phoenix, Arizona, and Naples, Florida, to southern India—Cox documents the surprising ways in which air-conditioning changes human experience: giving a boost to the global warming that it is designed to help us endure, providing a potent commercial stimulant, making possible an impossible commuter economy, and altering migration patterns (air-conditioning has helped alter the political hue of the United States by enabling a population boom in the red-state Sun Belt). While the book proves that the planet's atmosphere cannot sustain even our current use of air-conditioning, it also makes a much more positive argument that loosening our attachment to refrigerated air could bring benefits to humans and the planet that go well beyond averting a climate crisis. Though it saves lives in heat waves, air-conditioning may also be altering our bodies' sensitivity to heat; our rates of infection, allergy, asthma, and obesity; and even our sex drive. Air-conditioning has eroded social bonds and thwarted childhood adventure; it has transformed the ways we eat, sleep, travel, work, buy, relax, vote, and make both love and war. The final chapter surveys the many alternatives to conventional central air-conditioning. By reintroducing some traditional cooling methods, putting newly emerging technologies into practice, and getting beyond industrial definitions of comfort, we can make ourselves comfortable and keep the planet comfortable, too.


Losing Our Cool Related Books

Losing Our Cool
Language: en
Pages: 273
Authors: Stan Cox
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-05-25 - Publisher: The New Press

GET EBOOK

Losing our Cool shows how indoor climate control is colliding with an out-of-control outdoor climate. In America, energy consumed by home air-conditioning, and
FAA Aviation News
Language: en
Pages: 248
Authors:
Categories: Aeronautics
Type: BOOK - Published: 2002 - Publisher:

GET EBOOK

Climate Change in an Aging Society
Language: en
Pages: 257
Authors: Harry R. Moody
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2024-12-03 - Publisher: Taylor & Francis

GET EBOOK

Climate Change in an Aging Society is the first book fully devoted to the impact of climate change on those who are old today—and those who will be old in dec
Parenting in the 21st Century
Language: en
Pages: 154
Authors: Barbara Woster
Categories: Family & Relationships
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018-02-22 - Publisher: Barbara Woster

GET EBOOK

Educator and author, Barbara Woster, provides insight and offers advice to new and struggling parents. Whether you are expecting, have a newborn, toddler, or te
The Sharpest Knife: Lakshmana and His Words of Wisdom
Language: en
Pages: 270
Authors: Krishna's Mercy
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2024-01-15 - Publisher: Krishna's Mercy

GET EBOOK

“O You of great intellect, not even the demigods can fathom the level of Your intelligence. Due to bereavement Your wisdom is currently in a dormant state, an