Air Conditioners Banned in the Global Warming Nanny State

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is trying to round up enough votes to pass a counterpart to the House's Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that would impose an 83 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Proponents of the restrictions, which would require the average U.S. citizen to emit no more carbon dioxide than the average citizen emitted during the 1800s, publicly claim these draconian cuts will have little impact on our American lifestyle, other than inducing energy producers to utilize different fuel sources. The July 11 Washington Post, however, offered a peek at the bait-and-switch tactics the global warming alarmists seek to employ.

Stan Cox writes in the Post, “Washington didn't grind to a sweaty halt last week under triple-digit temperatures. People didn't even slow down. Instead, the three-day, 100-plus-degree, record-shattering heat wave prompted Washingtonians to crank up their favorite humidity-reducing, electricity-bill-busting, fluorocarbon-filled appliance: the air conditioner. This isn’t smart. … In a country that's among the world's highest greenhouse-gas emitters, air conditioning is one of the worst power-guzzlers.”

Think it gets hot in the summer? Try making it through the summer without air conditioning. Sure, the Washington Post article claims, people used to make it through summers without air conditioning in years past. People also used to make it through life without electricity, indoor plumbing, and anesthetic – but that doesn’t mean we should welcome a return to those times, either.

The Post article claims, “A.C.'s obvious public-health benefits during severe heat waves do not justify its lavish use in everyday life for months on end.” This is the ultimate example of the proposed dictatorship of the nanny-staters. ‘Just because I think I can make it through the summer without air conditioning, I don’t think anybody else should be able to use it, either.’

Give the article points for honesty, though. There is no way intermittent solar and wind power, which requires huge amounts of land development to produce only a small amount of unreliable electricity, can power our modern society. Cutting carbon dioxide emissions 83 percent, or anything even remotely approaching 83 percent, will require Americans doing much more than merely paying the exorbitant price increases required by solar and wind power. It will require a fundamental and foreboding restructuring of our entire way of life.