Title: Air-Conditioning Is an Environmental Quandary - The New York Times
Headings: The Cost of Cool
The Cost of Cool
Content: But so far the improvements have been dwarfed by humanity’s rising demands. And recent efforts to curb the use of air-conditioning, by fiat or persuasion, have produced sobering lessons. Since 2005, Japan had been promoting energy conservation through its annual summer “cool biz” campaign: air-conditioning thermostats in government offices were set to between 75 and 77 degrees and workers were told they could forsake business suits for looser, cooler clothes. So far so good. But in the past year, the country became an unwitting laboratory to study even more extreme air-conditioning abstinence, and the results have not been encouraging. After the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami knocked out a big chunk of the country’s nuclear power, the Japanese government mandated vastly reduced energy consumption. To that end, lights have been dimmed and air-conditioners turned down or off, so that offices comply with the government-prescribed indoor summer temperature of 82.4 degrees (28 Celsius); some offices have tried as high as 86. Image
Credit...
Victo Ngai
Unfortunately, studies by Shin-ichi Tanabe, a professor of architecture at Waseda University in Tokyo who has long been interested in “thermal comfort,” found that while workers tolerated dimmer light just fine, every degree rise in temperature above 25 Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) resulted in a 2 percent drop in productivity.