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Transcript for Season 5, Episode 4: Keeping Cool Without Warming the Planet
HOST: In April of 2023, the city of phoenix, arizona recorded its first heat-related death of the year. A 46-year-old woman.
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HOST: It was the start of Maricopa county’s annual heat season. a season that is becoming longer, and more intense every year.
NEWS ANCHOR: So far at least four people have died from the heat in 2023. Largely people who live on the streets or people who do not have access to air conditioning.
NEWS ANCHOR TWO: Last year, a record 425 people died in Maricopa county of heat-related illnesses. This year, now on track to be even worse.
NEWS ANCHOR THREE: For more on how the city is handling the heat wave, I'm joined by David Hondula. He leads the office of heat response and mitigation in phoenix. Uh, David it’s good to see you, thanks for joining the newshour.
DAVID HONDULA: Well Stephanie, thanks for having us back on, and we share your concern that this is …
David Hondula: It was about mid-June when the probabilities of being really above normal started to tick up on the long range forecasts from the National Climatic Data Center.
HOST: Dr. David Hondula is the Chief Heat Officer for the city of Phoenix. He oversees the city’s response and mitigation of intense heat-related weather events.
David Hondula: We — knowing that even the previous summer had been worse than the summer before and worse than the summer before — we pulled together as a city team to think about what else can we do with our rising unsheltered population, rising cases of substance use, in the community? The recipe, unfortunately, was there for a really bad outcome.
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HOST: By the end of the 2023 heat season, Maricopa county recorded 645 heat-related deaths. 50 percent more than the previous year.
David Hondula: It was a lot of those on the fly logistics and human resources that were occupying a lot of our time and energy and remembering that those people who were asking to do more to serve the community, they were putting themselves in harm's way now. We had some really hard conversations. Is today a safe day for our outreach teams to be on the street?
HOST: It’s impossible to know how many deaths or serious illnesses Hondula and his team prevented. But these kinds of scenarios are just the beginning. The heat is now a consistent and mounting problem, virtually everywhere.
NEWS REPORTER FOUR: SOUTH SUDAN’S GOVERNMENT IS CLOSING DOWN ALL SCHOOLS STARTING MONDAY AS THE COUNTRY PREPARES FOR A WAVE OF EXTREME HEAT EXPECTED TO LAST TWO WEEKS.
NEWS REPORTER FIVE: NOW IN EUROPE, NEARLY 62,000 PEOPLE DIED LAST SUMMER FROM HEAT-RELATED DEATHS.
NEWS REPORTER SIX: IN INDIA, AT LEAST 11 PEOPLE DIED OF HEAT STROKE THIS WEEK, WHILE BANGLADESH IS SEEING ITS HIGHEST TEMPERATURES IN ALMOST 60 YEARS, AND SEASONAL RAINS HAVE SO FAR FAILED TO APPEAR.
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HOST: Here in the United States, heat kills more people every year than any other weather event. Like other disasters, heat is particularly dangerous for vulnerable populations. The sick, the elderly, people without permanent housing. 2023 was the hottest year on record, and scientists expect it to get worse. And when it comes to heat, one of the best tools we have to fight it is air conditioning.
The first modern air conditioning system was installed in a brooklyn printing plant in 1902, one year after a heat wave killed nearly 10,000 people across the eastern United States. Since then, air conditioners have become a fixture of modern life in many parts of the world. They’ve changed the way we live. And they’ve also contributed to global warming.
It’s a conundrum, really. The hotter it gets, the more air conditioning we’ll use, and the hotter it’ll get. So how do we keep cool and not make the planet hotter at the same time?
I’m Arielle Duhaime-Ross, and this is The World As You’ll Know It.
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Rachel Kyte: So over a number of years working on climate change and teaching climate diplomacy, I became more and more interested in cooling.
HOST: Rachel Kyte has had many titles over her career. She's worked with the world bank, She’s taught climate policy at the university of oxford. She's also a former UN special representative. I wanted to speak with Kyte, because for most of her career, she’s focused on a problem that looms large over much of the planet. The challenge of keeping people cool.
Rachel Kyte: So air conditioning technology has revolutionized what we can do, where we can do it, and how we can do it. So it's meant that we can sit in a glass encased tower in the middle of summer. As long as we've got the electricity to run, to keep us cool. And the irony of that is that that electricity, when it is fueled by fossil fuels, which is where most electricity is fueled from up until now, that's been the source of emissions, which have warmed our atmosphere. That's where climate change is coming from. And so the burning of fossil fuels, means that we are heating up the planet, and then using some of that electricity to cool ourselves down while we heat ourselves up. So it's as if humanity is trying to defy the laws of thermodynamics.
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HOST: Air conditioning is energy intensive. But that’s not the only issue.
ACs also release potent greenhouse gasses called hydrofluorocarbons. And these gasses have been contributing to global warming for more than 90 years. The net effect is that, today, air conditioners contribute four percent of global emissions.
The goal is to bring that number down. Which is a growing challenge. Because more and more people will turn to ACs, for the first time, to keep cool.
Rachel Kyte: And as we saw, the extreme heat events of 2023 from the UK to India, to elsewhere, we saw the big peak and the big drive of energy demand coming from, uh, people putting their air conditioning on all day, all night.
HOST: There’s a growing demand for air conditioning most everywhere. Take Seattle. For years, Seattle was the least air-conditioned city in America. In 2013, just 31 percent of Seattle homes had AC. By 2021, that number had topped 53 percent. And some countries like India have seen AC purchases skyrocket.
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HOST: It’s that growing demand for air conditioning — particularly in the developing world — that interested Rachel Kyte.
Rachel Kyte: How do you make sure that all of the people whose aspirations are to be better off, whose aspirations are to be resilient and safe, to have access to electricity, to have access to the things that they need, that their aspiration to be cool and to be kept cool, uh, doesn't become something that makes the planet even more unsafe? I.e. their demand for cooling will drive energy demand? This is well within our human capability to make things, uh, much more efficient in their use of electricity and to use new technologies to get a greater impact.
If you think about where investment in solar, photovoltaics were 10, 15 years ago, where investment in battery storage was 10, 15 years ago. We need to see that kind of influx of patient capital and venture capital into new ways of keeping ourselves cool.
I think that the cooling revolution is at a very early stage and will need to be something that, uh, you know, which is something the United States is very good at, right, putting capital together with entrepreneurship and, and research.
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HOST: We wanted to talk with someone working at the forefront of this cooling revolution. So, we reached out to Dr. Daniel Betts.
Daniel Betts: Humans, today, we spend over 80% of our time indoors. We are indoor [chuckles] we live in our caves, right? We're indoor animals. And so, how well we feel and our level of comfort is directly dependent on this air that is surrounding you. And that air is being provided by these machines. Air conditioning.
HOST: Betts is an engineer and the founder of the air conditioning company, Blue Frontier. His interest in cooling started with trying to make electricity more stable back home.
Daniel Betts: My initial work was back in my home country of Panama, you can hear that from my accent, [chuckle]. So, I used to work on planning of future loads for the country in order for them to make the investments in infrastructure for the grid.
And how to optimize the existing power generation systems for meeting those loads. And the majority of those loads were air conditioning. So that was my first sort of realization that air conditioning is something that changes the nature of how you produce power and how it affects the infrastructure investments that you have to do, and also how difficult it is to meet that growing load in air conditioning with renewable energy.
HOST: Betts did his Ph.D. in the US. And it was there that he started looking at ways to make ACs more efficient and less of a burden on the grid.
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Daniel Betts: But when I started looking into the air conditioning space, there was almost no one doing anything about it. Most of that technology was incremental to the existing technology. And I couldn't see the sense of urgency within the industry to make really material changes.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: I want to ask you in the simplest terms possible, how exactly does a standard AC work right now?
Daniel Betts: Well, air conditioning has 2 components. One is temperature reduction. You're basically pumping heat from inside your house, absorbing it into the low temperature refrigerant, and then expelling it into the atmosphere through the high temperature refrigerant. This process works okay. And the other one is humidity control.
HOST: When you see an AC leaking outside, that’s actually moisture pulled out of the air it’s cooling. So temperature reduction and humidity control. That's pretty much what air conditioners do.
There have been some incremental changes to their size. And they’ve become more efficient and less polluting. But fundamentally, the technology has been the same since the 1950’s.
Archival Woman: I can’t live another day without air conditioning
Archival Man: says tomorrow’s going to be hotter
Archival Woman: hotter?
Archival Man: like yesterday
Archival Woman: Yesterday? you said you’d call Sears….
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Can you explain how air conditioning contributes to global warming?
Daniel Betts: Yeah. It has two components. One of them is that they consume enormous amounts of energy, and they consume all that energy at the wrong time. So as temperatures outside increase, air conditioners turn on.
They're pumping heat from inside your building to the outside. And the hotter it is outside, the harder it is for you to pump that heat out. And so the result of that is that as the temperature starts to increase, the energy consumption of the conventional air conditioner also increases, and the cooling capacity of those air conditioning systems starts to drop, creating sort of a worst case scenario of very large electricity consumption during those periods of times when you need that air conditioning to work.
HOST: 19 percent of the energy used in American homes goes to powering air conditioners. That's about as much as the power used by refrigerators, lighting, and televisions combined. In commercial buildings, 14 percent of all electricity goes to air conditioning, according to the department of energy.
Daniel Betts: And the worse is you don't know how bad is going to get into the future. So the climate is changing. It's warming. Whatever you design for today, based on historical loads for air conditioning and cooling of your processes, is not real because things are going to get worse into the future. Making it such that there's a level of uncertainty on the design that you need to build.
HOST: Of course, you might be able to offset some of that impact by powering ACs with renewables. Like solar or wind. Solar power provides energy during the daytime. But that’s not when humans use their ACs most. Peak usage actually comes in the evenings and early mornings. When utilities are more dependent on fossil fuels. Wind, meanwhile, can be intermittent.
Problem number two, is those hydrofluorocarbons I mentioned earlier. The refrigerants that are central to how ACs work.
Daniel Betts: The conventional air conditioning uses refrigerants that are 2000 times more powerful greenhouse gas emitters than CO2. And almost every air conditioning system leaks a portion of this refrigerant. And when the refrigerants are being produced, transported, etc., it also starts to leak. It is expected that around 5% of global climate change that's going to occur between now and 2030, is going to be attributed just to the leakage of refrigerant into the atmosphere. And so, those two components make it such that air conditioning is, is particularly bad from a global warming perspective.
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Daniel Betts: So if air conditioning could be flexible in its load and ultra-high efficiency, that would enable us to solve the principal things that make air conditioning unsustainable.
HOST: Bett’s company, blue frontier, is one of the startups working on a new generation of air conditioners. machines that are more efficient than AC’s today and that won’t be as reliant on today’s refrigerants.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: How does the technology you're working on work?
Daniel Betts: Yeah. So instead of using a refrigerant to create dehumidification and cooling, we use a salt solution in that in the term of the art, is a liquid desiccant. (FADE UNDER) But, this salt solution will absorb humidity directly from the air. If you, put it in contact with it.
HOST: Ok look, there’s a lot going on inside the machine betts is describing. But here’s the basic explanation. Warm, humid air from inside your room enters the AC unit. That air passes through a desiccant that acts like a sponge, drying it out. Now, dry air is a lot easier to cool down than humid air. So, through a series of mostly natural processes involving evaporation and heat exchange. That AC unit is able to chill the air and cool your room. Finally, the system recycles the heat that’s generated during this process and uses it in subsequent cycles.
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Daniel Betts: which means that I, I end up with very low energy consumption because I have a very good energy recovery. I'm using the cold side of the heat pump as an energy recovery.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: I see.
Daniel Betts: Anyway, the effect is very little energy consumption is being used to wring out this liquid desiccant.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: So the machine that you're creating sort of partially creates its own source of energy.
Daniel Betts: Yes, exactly. It creates its own capacity to create cooling.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: So what is stopping us from implementing this right now? You know, what are the obstacles in your way and why don't I have one of these units in my house?
Daniel Betts: industrial technology like this, has its own sort of, um, speed limit. And that's because you have to build factories and you have to deploy systems with partners so that they can be installed by architects and engineers. And so Blue Frontier is in the process of creating that scalability.
HOST: One big hurdle to that scalability is just the way commercial buildings operate.
Daniel Betts: in a commercial building space, a large portion of buildings are occupied by tenants that pay rent to a building owner.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Mmhmm.
Daniel Betts: And the building owner decides what equipment goes into their building because it's their building.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Right? Sure.
Daniel Betts But the tenant pays the electric bill. And so there's a natural, perverse incentive that exists in the market for implementation of advanced technology.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Right. They'll go with something cheaper that might cost the customer more, because it's not their problem. Essentially.
Daniel Betts: It's not their problem. Exactly. And so how do you sell high efficiency technology into that space, without entering into a discussion of capital costs or lowest capital cost?
HOST: Blue Frontier plans to experiment with its pricing model, offering to set up the system for free and then charging for the AC in installments. The hope is that the energy savings and the environmental benefits will be so attractive to tenants, that building owners will want to upgrade.
But changes like that, they can require a lot of convincing. Which is where the government comes in.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: In the back of your mind are you sort of hoping that the government will regulate the use of more efficient ACs and require commercial buildings to adopt them? You know, these things have happened in the past, thinking about light bulbs, for instance. Is that what you expect to happen in your field as well?
Daniel Betts: Yeah, I think, I think it will happen and I think it's already happening. So, energy efficiency standards for buildings is something that is already occurring across multiple cities. And actually almost every city that I know of, that is a medium to large size city has some level of minimum energy efficiency standards.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: And on the flip side of that, what concerns you the most if we don't implement these kinds of changes? You know, if we don't make air conditioners more efficient as soon as possible?
Daniel Betts: Um, we can end up in a spiral. And it's a spiral of despair. I see a world like that, in which there could be significant disparities. One in which certain buildings are comfortable and people live well, and they can escape from the worst weather conditions. But in which a majority of people in the world are not part of that. And they live with all the negative health effects associated with the lack of air conditioning. With the deaths associated with a lack of air conditioning and their incapacity to be as productive as others. And so that's the world that scares me.
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Rachel Kyte: 6 or 7 years ago, we would go through this exercise with people, policymakers. I did it once in a UN conference, and I asked everybody to close their eyes and just imagine their day if they had access to clean, affordable energy. And that was being used to improve air quality and to keep buildings and things cool.
HOST: This is Rachel kyte again, the former UN Special Representative.
Rachel Kyte: You know, imagine not hearing the cricket-like sound of a diesel generator, for example, and what that would mean to the quality of life of a stallholder in an open market in Lagos, for example. What it would feel like to be in a building where you could open the windows and close the windows, and the building was responding to the environments outside, and you didn't have to, uh, listen to that air conditioner or experience the sort of dry air. And imagine what it would be like to commute on public transport, which was safe and cool and clean. And imagine what it would be like to live in a building where the walls were green, and the roof was green. You know, if you can imagine it, you can build it. And I think that that's an important part of who we are.
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Arielle Duhaime-Ross: What makes heat an urgent issue to leaders and policymakers? What makes them pay attention and stand up and start to do something?
Rachel Kyte: Well, I think the kinds of extreme heat events that we've seen in the last 24 months have meant that railway systems have closed because the rails have buckled. The lines are not safe. It means that people using public transport are not safe because the buses, the trains, and the metro are not well cooled enough.
HOST: When heat affects the economy, Kyte says that’s what gets the attention of world leaders.
Rachel Kyte: We've seen, you know, people going to a sports event or going to a concert and becoming ill or even dying. So it's affecting every element of what it means, uh, to live. It affects culture. It affects economic activity. It affects people's travel patterns. It's affecting every piece of life. And it's putting pressure on health systems and it's putting pressure on education systems. And so I think this gets people's attention.
HOST: A 2021 Atlantic Council report estimates that the U.S economy may be losing around 100 billion dollars every year due to high temperatures.
The losses are caused by things like factories shutting down, and equipment malfunctions. There's also the issue of workers just not being able to function or not showing up for work ‘cause it’s just too hot. And researchers estimate that number might double by 2030. And then there are the consequences of staying open for business and having to go work.
Corporations like Amazon, UPS, and Fedex have faced a lot of scrutiny because of the heat that’s been recorded in delivery trucks and in warehouses. Drivers and warehouse workers have collapsed on the job. Some have died.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 40 people die at work, every year, due to heat-related illness. But many experts agree that number is likely an undercount.
Rachel Kyte: So I think from a health and safety point of view, accepting this new normal of extreme heat events and their regularity means really looking at well, what are the safe limits? It's not only up the temperature, it's also duration. More breaks, maybe changing the work day in order to fit into, uh, the cooler parts of the day. I mean, we're going to have to shift our behavior.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Right
Rachel Kyte: And you know, it's not only about building fridges to live inside ovens, right? It's not just about investing in air conditioning. It's going to be more, more systemic than that, I think.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: You know, we've talked about a few of the impacts of heat waves. We've talked about obviously, the impact on just the human body, on human health. But I believe that there are other impacts as well. Can you name a few?
Rachel Kyte: Yeah. The two that occupy policy makers attention is the ability to protect the cold chain for vaccines and for other medication. And of course yeah, the global pandemic, the Covid pandemic was, uh, an exemplar of that because, you know, in that particular case, many of the vaccines that were coming forward needed to be kept at a very, very low temperature. Normally they need to be kept just around just just above freezing. But some of these were requiring really deep cooling. And, of course, that poses all kinds of challenges, especially in developing countries. The other is food, right? Keeping food safe and keeping food fresh from farm to market and then from market to home. This becomes an extremely important part of food security.
HOST: Last year, Kyte went to Dubai to attend Cop 28, the climate conference. There, countries including the United States, Canada, and Kenya, signed the global cooling pledge. It's the first initiative to specifically target climate-warming emissions from cooling. This includes emissions from refrigerating food and medicine, as well as air conditioning.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: How does cooling technology fit into the 2050 Paris climate goals?
Rachel Kyte: So this is at the heart of the Paris Agreement. We saw in the most recent talks in Dubai in November, countries coming together with industry and with communities and others to really make a cooling pledge. That we should be able to provide cooling to more people with greater efficiency and that this has to be a sort of a political priority. But as I said there's a huge issue of social equity in the middle of all of this because we cannot frame the debate as poor people or people on low income who have legitimate aspirations to improve their lot. Their desire and their need to keep themselves cool. We cannot have those people's aspirations be, you know, uh, blamed for, for the rise in energy demand.
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HOST: On the next episode of The World As You’ll Know It, we’re talking about green hydrogen.
Rachel Fahkry: This is a resource that essentially could replace fossil fuels in those really tricky, we call them, hard to electrify applications.
Jason Mortimer: We’re doing the thing that hasn’t been done at the scale that’s never been imagined. We are collectively figuring out, what’s the right way to begin?
HOST: I'm Arielle Duhaime-Ross. We'll be back next week.
The World As You’ll Know It is brought to you by Aventine, a non-profit research institute creating and sharing work that explores how today’s decisions could affect the future. The views expressed don’t necessarily reflect those of Aventine, its employees or affiliates.
For a transcript of the episode and more resources related to what you've heard in today's episode, please visit Aventine dot org slash podcast.
Danielle Mattoon is the executive director at Aventine. Bruce Headlam is the editorial director at Aventine.
This episode was produced by Lisa Cerda with support from Alexis Moore, Elliot Adler, and me, Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Additional writing and producing from Bruce Headlam. Our Editor is Eric Mennel. Kamilah Kashanie is our managing producer.
Original music by Vera Weber and Davy Sumner, with additional music from Epidemic Sound.
This episode was mixed by Marina Paiz. Our recording engineers are Pedro Alvira, Hannis Brown, & Davy Sumner. Additional support from Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks.
Research and fact checking by Will Tavlin. Creative direction and design by Curt Courtenay and Lauren Viera.
Music licensing by Extreme Music and Epidemic Sounds.
Our Executive Producer is Je-Anne Berry.
Special thanks to Emerald O’Brien and Xandra Ellin.
I'm your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross.
Make sure to listen to us on the Audacy app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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