Date: January 17th, 2022 2:42 PM
Author: ,.,;,;,.;,.;,.;,,,,;,.,;
...and the reply from a stakeholder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpLfvzNStNU
How the Refrigerator Became an Agent of Climate Catastrophe
The evolution of cooling technology helps to explain why
supposed solutions to global warming have only made the situation worse.
By David Owen
January 15, 2022
Archival photograph of 3 men picking ice blocks through a channel on a lake.
Ice harvesting on Bantam Lake, in Connecticut. Harvesters in the
state and elsewhere once packed lake and river ice in sawdust and
shipped it as far away as India and Australia.Photograph courtesy Bantam
Historical Society
A couple of years ago, in spring, my wife and I took our dog for
a walk near Bantam Lake, in northwestern Connecticut, a few miles from
our house. In swampy woods on the lake’s northern shore, we noticed a
double row of lichen-spattered concrete pillars, each one four or five
feet tall. The rows began at the edge of the water and extended maybe
two hundred yards into the trees. Nearby was a narrow canal filled with
water and dead leaves, crossed in several places by wooden bridges that
looked like shipping pallets. In a rectangular clearing beyond the
inland end of the canal, we saw two parallel strips of concrete,
hundreds of feet long and more than a hundred feet apart. They made
useful walking paths over the mucky ground.
I learned later that we had seen ruins of the Berkshire Ice
Company, which ran a harvesting operation on the lake a century ago.
Each winter, at that site, Berkshire employed a hundred and forty men,
many of whom lived in bunkhouses. They worked from three in the morning
until six at night, seven days a week. Teams of horses pulling
sleigh-like “scorers” cut grid lines in the ice, and men with long
handsaws followed the lines. The ice, to judge from old photographs, was
more than a foot thick. The concrete pillars that we saw supported a
conveyer belt. It moved freshly cut blocks away from the lake to an
immense icehouse, which stood on the concrete footings that we had used
as walking paths. The icehouse held sixty thousand tons. Train cars
could be loaded from two sides of the building at the same time.
According to a historical booklet published by the White
Memorial Foundation, the conservation nonprofit that owns the land now,
the harvest typically began each year in late November, and ended in
mid-March. I went back to the same spot several times in recent months,
beginning shortly before Thanksgiving, and saw no ice at all, much less
enough to support men and horses and heavy equipment. Many of the
homeowners had pulled their docks onto the shore for the winter, but the
entire lake was open water. On the afternoon of December 16th, the
temperature was sixty-one degrees.
Changes in the Earth’s climate in recent decades have been both
frighteningly swift and deceptively slow. Once in a while, though, you
notice something that knocks you over. Many unsettling transformations
are concealed within 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Ice harvesting on Bantam Lake ended in 1929. The proximate cause
was a fire that destroyed the icehouse, but the business was doomed
anyway, by the rise of artificial ice production and the growing
popularity of a new consumer product: the household refrigerator.
Kelvinators, General Electric Monitor Tops, and other early residential
models were crude and expensive, but they and their successors
eventually displaced icehouses, horse-drawn scorers, and overworked
sawyers. The evolution of cooling technology can be viewed as a parable
of our unfolding climate catastrophe, partly because the technology has
directly contributed to the crisis, but mainly because its history
suggests a counterintuitive explanation for why combatting global
warming has proved to be so hard, and why some of our putative solutions
are actually making our problems worse.
Men picking ice blocks through a channel.
The end of ice harvesting on Bantam Lake, in 1929, corresponded
with a rise in artificial ice production and the growing popularity of
the household refrigerator.Photograph courtesy Bantam Historical Society
In temperate places, regularly using cold to preserve food first
became practical in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when
harvesters in Connecticut and elsewhere began packing lake and river ice
in sawdust and shipping it as far away as India and Australia.
Large-scale artificial production followed. My mother, who is
ninety-two, calls her refrigerator her icebox, because when she was a
little girl that’s what her parents had: a zinc-lined food-storage
cupboard that didn’t plug into anything and sometimes dripped meltwater
onto the kitchen floor.
The first electric refrigerators were loud, poorly insulated,
and occasionally dangerous, and they cost more than some new cars. As
the technology improved and prices dropped, though, they upended
multiple industries. Iceboxes and neighborhood icemen gradually
disappeared, of course, but the production, packaging, distribution,
retailing, purchasing, and consumption of food were transformed, too. At
around the time that the Bantam Lake ice business ended, Clarence
Birdseye, an American businessman and inventor, introduced
flash-freezing technology, and the tiny freezer compartments of early
household refrigerators grew to make room for Birds Eye peas and
spinach, and also for the aluminum trays that set my father’s teeth on
edge when he pulled their handles to free ice cubes for his cocktails.
My grandchildren dispense ice cubes for themselves by pressing a
glass against a lever in their freezer door. My wife and I don’t have
one of those, but we do have a refrigerator-freezer in our kitchen and
another in our basement, along with a full-size stand-alone freezer. We
are by no means the most well-equipped people we know; we don’t have a
temperature-controlled wine-storage cabinet, an under-counter
refrigerated beverage drawer next to our dishwasher, or a third
refrigerator, in our garage. Even crummy motel rooms now have
refrigerators (always running, seldom used). I sometimes buy gas at a
big new Cumberland Farms, which, like many modern gas stations, has more
refrigerated display space than the A. & P. where my mother did her
grocery shopping when I was little. The small grocery store near my
house has an entire refrigerated room just for beer.
Refrigerators use compressors, condensers, and coils filled with
volatile compounds to transfer heat from inside to outside; this same
innovation made air-conditioning possible. When I was born, in 1955,
air-conditioners in houses (and cars) were rare; today, in almost all of
the United States, they’re close to universal. My mother’s father
stayed semi-comfortable during Kansas City summers in the thirties and
forties by moving a bed into his screened porch and wearing seersucker
suits to work. Now it’s possible to pass entire days without
encountering air that hasn’t been artificially cooled—and, once you get
used to cooled air, its absence can feel unendurable. (In 2011, a
retired Army general estimated that the Defense Department was spending a
little over twenty billion dollars a year to provide air-conditioning
for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
The use of cooling technology is growing worldwide. China now
accounts for close to half of global air-conditioner purchases and
roughly three-quarters of global production; in Dubai, where life during
much of the year would be next to impossible without air-conditioning,
hotel swimming pools are chilled. According to a report published in
2018 by the International Energy Agency, refrigeration in 2016 accounted
for about six per cent of the world’s energy consumption, and space
cooling accounted for about eight per cent. In the same report, the
I.E.A. predicted that worldwide energy use by air-conditioners would
triple by 2050, “requiring new electricity capacity the equivalent to
the combined electricity capacity of the United States, the E.U. and
Japan today.” Energy use by refrigerators is on a similar upward path.
Much of the world’s recent growth in cooling capability has been
an adaptive response to global warming. The problem is
self-perpetuating, because the electricity that refrigerators and
air-conditioners run on is mostly generated by burning fossil fuels.
There are other climate impacts. Hydrofluorocarbons—which, for decades,
have been the volatile compounds circulating inside most new cooling
equipment—were widely adopted as refrigerants because they don’t have
the same destructive effect on the Earth’s ozone layer as their
immediate predecessors, chlorofluorocarbons. But hydrofluorocarbons are
greenhouse gases with hundreds or thousands of times the warming
potential of carbon dioxide. Last year, the Environmental Protection
Agency adopted a rule phasing down their production and use in the
United States by eighty-five per cent over the next fifteen years. But
vast quantities are still being manufactured. Leakage is a common
problem, and not only when old refrigerators and air-conditioners end up
at the dump.
The most widely embraced strategy for slowing the warming caused
by cooling technology is to increase the energy efficiency of new
refrigerators and air-conditioners. In a 2011 report, the U.S.
Department of Energy estimated that its new efficiency standards for
refrigerators (which went into effect in 2014 and are currently being
updated) would “save the nation almost four and a half quadrillion BTUs
over 30 years. That’s three times more than the total energy currently
used by all refrigeration products in U.S. homes annually. It’s also the
equivalent amount of energy savings that could be used to power a third
of Africa for an entire year.” The I.E.A., in its 2018 report, argued
that, through “stringent minimum energy performance standards and other
measures such as labelling, the average energy efficiency of the stock
of ACs worldwide could more than double between now and 2050.”
Implementing those changes, it said, would significantly reduce the need
for new electricity infrastructure, flattening the curve of future
energy demand.
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This strategy sounds both logical and doable. But history
suggests that it won’t succeed. Artificial cooling caught on initially
because it was more efficient than packing lake ice in sawdust and
loading it onto trains and ships. During the decades since then, the
efficiency of cooling machines has increased steadily and spectacularly.
Indeed, the stunning growth in cooling machines’ energy consumption has
been paralleled, from the beginning, by equally stunning growth in
their energy efficiency. Some of the biggest gains began in the
mid-nineteen-seventies, in the aftermath of the Arab oil embargo, but
efficiency improvements had preceded the crisis, and they continued long
after it had passed. In 2010, the World Economic Forum estimated that
the average refrigerator for sale at that time used only a quarter as
much energy as a typical 1975 model, yet had twenty per cent more
storage capacity and cost only forty per cent as much. Today’s
refrigerators and air-conditioners are more efficient still.
If increased energy efficiency makes over-all energy consumption
go down, as the I.E.A. and the D.O.E. suggest, then why does our
warming problem keep getting worse? Defenders of efficiency as a climate
strategy argue that the amount of energy our machines use today would
be vastly higher if our machines were as inefficient as they were ten or
twenty or fifty years ago. But the flaw in that argument is easy to
see. If the only refrigerators we could buy now were thirties-era G. E.
Monitor Tops, Cumberland Farms wouldn’t have an entire wall filled with
chilled soft drinks and drinking water (in minimally recyclable plastic
bottles, which themselves would not exist without the efficient
refrigerated display cases that keep them cold). Similarly, if the only
way to fly from one coast to the other were to hitch a ride with the
Wright brothers, you wouldn’t travel to California for Christmas.
The I.E.A. says that if we successfully implement what it calls
an “Efficient Cooling Scenario,” by optimizing the energy efficiency of
our cooling machines, we could save almost three trillion dollars by
2050. If we really do that, though, we will have three trillion to spend
on something else, and whatever we spend it on will inevitably have
climate consequences of its own. The history of civilization is, in many
ways, the history of accelerating improvements in energy efficiency.
Extracting greater value from smaller inputs is how we’ve made ourselves
rich; it’s also how we’ve created the problem that we’re now trying to
address with more of the same. Making useful technologies more efficient
makes them cheaper, and as they become cheaper we use them more and
find more uses for them, just as adding lanes to congested highways
makes driving more attractive, not less. In 2011, the D.O.E.’s
forecasters presumably didn’t anticipate that improvements in energy
efficiency would make it increasingly economical to power and cool the
server farms that mine and manage cryptocurrencies. The correlation
between growth in efficiency and growth in consumption is not
accidental.
My wife and I lived in Connecticut without air-conditioning for
thirty-seven years. The summers are getting hotter, though, and we’re
both in our sixties and therefore more susceptible to heat-related
health problems. In December, we installed a modern four-zone
air-conditioning system in our house. Because the system is so energy
efficient, a consortium that includes the state and two electric
utilities covered part of the cost. The transaction encapsulates the
main flaw of America’s principal response to climate change: we
increased our annual energy consumption by making a luxury addition to
our house and got credit for helping to save the world.
On January 2, 2022, I went back to Bantam Lake and saw two
pickup trucks and a boat trailer parked near the state launch ramp. The
day was too cold for water skiing but warm enough for dog walking in
just a sweater. A little later, I spotted the boat, with two guys in it.
They were probably fishing, or maybe they were just tooling around.
There was no ice anywhere, not even on the puddles in the parking lot.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5009772&forum_id=2#43798771)
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