“For years we have known that air conditioning protects people from extreme heat, but we could only guess by how much because the available data told us who owned an air conditioner, not who could actually afford to run one,” said Kai Chen, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.
The strong protective effect of AC against heat-attributable mortality indicates the public health necessity of addressing urban heat by making AC affordable and greening urban spaces, the authors noted.
Ironically not open access facepalm
Your understanding of what is driving Climate Change has been successfully focused entirely on a complex of guilt and shame within you about your own carbon footprint.
This is leading you to suggest that installing a lifesaving tool that takes up some energy is not worth the thousands and thousands of lives it saves during heatwaves.
Please stop denying your own humanity and the humanity of others and focus on fighting the actual drivers of Climate Change before you end up accidentally killing yourself just because you couldn’t live in a way that perfectly minimized your impact.
This is NOT a slippery slope we all should be obsessed with, it is not that slippery and there are far scarier slippery slopes all around us that should be getting our attention.
Ultimately being against AC is just another form of ecofascism hiding in the language of personal responsibility to obscure the responsibilities of capital, industry and society.