A Sucker Boiled Every Minute?

Energy conservation is not a sign of weakness

It’s hot in France right now. My brother-in-law lived in the 14th Arrondissement for nearly twenty-five years in a sequence of tiny apartments located in very old buildings. Central air conditioning was not really an option for him or his neighbors. The A/C situation is beginning to change because it must: Paris heat waves are becoming more frequent and more intense. Magnification of the greenhouse effect, driven directly by human energy consumption habits, is leading to climatic shifts that, among other things, are rapidly making continental Europe a less hospitable place to live in the summertime. To their credit, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board (Board) doesn’t explicitly contradict these easily measurable trends in their latest broadside against “climate scolds.” The French government, realizing that widespread summer heat adaptation will become increasingly urgent and expensive, has urged Parisians to limit their air conditioning usage to prevent unmanageable electricity spikes. French citizens are asked to set their thermostats no lower than 78 degrees Fahrenheit. The Board suggests that to do is considered a “green faux pas” and a “climate obsession.”

Non! This is an appeal for energy conservation, the same appeal made by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) every time a summer heat wave descends on Texas. That’s right: Ruby red, hard-right Republican, free-market, climate science-skeptical Texas. And people here don’t like it any better than anyone else does when they are asked to set their thermostats at (you guessed it) 78 degrees Fahrenheit. I can assure you that ERCOT is not framing these requests as some sort of communal self-flagellation exercise or as a zealous commitment to climate stabilization for showing our eternal devotion to the weather gods. ERCOT is in charge of making sure that the electric grid doesn’t collapse, i.e. remains Reliable with a capital R. Large electricity distribution networks are pretty fragile. They can buckle under what might seem like a minor amount of stress. And when millions of sweltering people crank up their air conditioners in unison, the resulting jolt can put the entire system at risk. If you want to build a new electric grid that can easily handle the largest instantaneous power demand made on the hottest day imaginable, then you are going to have to pay for it: more power plants, more power lines, higher electric bills. And it won’t be built in a day. These facts hold as fast in Paris, France as they do in Paris, Texas, mes amis.

We do need to expand and refurbish electric infrastructure. That immense project is expected to cost trillions of dollars worldwide over the next several decades. It will need to compete for capital with wars, Olympic stadiums, tax breaks for the rich, and everything else we choose to spend money on. The Board mocks French attempts to find lower energy workarounds to air conditioning wherever they may be available.

“The real cold splash of water is the public’s realization that climate obsessions come at a cost, and they’ll be the saps sweating under its burden. Marine Le Pen of the insurgent-right National Rally said this summer that she’d support an air-conditioning equipment initiative for the French. She’s right to see a hot political opportunity.”

You can count me in as one of the “saps,” because I can’t afford to keep my house at a temperature suitable for freezing a side of beef. Most of us can’t, and if you can, please don’t, OK? The good news is that extreme levels of cooling aren’t needed for health or reasonable comfort. People can indeed live quite well at an indoor temperature of 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Avoiding large optional cooling loads such as ginormous, wall-size television sets won’t hurt, either. Do your part to help us all cope, and don’t blame regulators for doing the jobs they were hired to do. The climate is changing, not because “the left” wants it to change, but because we have, collectively, used far too much energy for far too long. The more energy we use, the more raw materials we consume, the more greenhouse gases rise into the atmosphere, the hotter it gets, and the more energy we use to stay cool… There is only one way to stop this insane, heat-generating merry-go-round from spinning out of control, and that is to stop pushing.