Losing Our Cool

Losing Our Cool
Author :
Publisher : The New Press
Total Pages : 273
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781595586025
ISBN-13 : 1595586024
Rating : 4/5 (25 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: 0
Authors: Stan Cox
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Losing Our Cool exposes the surprising ways in which air conditioning changes human experience: giving a boost to global warming that it is designed to help hum
Losing Our Cool
Language: en
Pages: 273
Authors: Stan Cox
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-05-25 - Publisher: The New Press

DOWNLOAD 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
Losing My Cool
Language: en
Pages: 173
Authors: Thomas Chatterton Williams
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-04-29 - Publisher: Penguin

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A pitch-perfect account of how hip-hop culture drew in the author and how his father drew him out again-with love, perseverance, and fifteen thousand books. Int
Our Missing Hearts
Language: en
Pages: 286
Authors: Celeste Ng
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2022-10-04 - Publisher: Penguin

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An instant New York Times bestseller • A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 • Named a Best Book of 2022 by People, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, USA
False Alarm
Language: en
Pages: 347
Authors: Bjorn Lomborg
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-07-14 - Publisher: Basic Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An “essential” (Times UK) and “meticulously researched” (Forbes) book by “the skeptical environmentalist” argues that panic over climate change is c