Unconditioned Surrender?

Captivating  NYT graphic 

As usual, another day, another thought (and blog) provoking article in the NYT. This article, and a very nice accompanying graphic, highlight the quandary that is presented by, on the one hand, an increasingly warming planet and on the other an increasingly affluent, tropical, and urban populace that would like nothing better than to beat the heat (thus adding to energy scarcity and global warming problems).

So forget global warming and climate change for the moment, right? Even if you are a "climate skeptic" (and it is difficult for me to give you that), one walk around office blocks or residential communities here in India will (not scientifically, but still) show you how there is more latent demand for 'AC' units in any one major Indian city than all of the continental US. The problem, as highlighted by the recent epic failure of two major grids in Northern India, is that there just isn't enough power to fuel all those ACs (which are increasingly affordable)!

The article also points out that air conditioning isn't a nice to have feature any more either - there are plenty of studies showing it helps human beings be more productive at work and have better health overall (when used 'correctly'). Anecdotal evidence suggests also that a lot of modern architecture, obsessed as it is with fitting as many people into as little space as possible in offices and in homes, actually demands air conditioning to make the buildings habitable!

So what is to be done?

The only thing individuals can do (and that my wife and I have done) is resist installing air conditioning at home. We've held out for about 3.5 years now, and done OK without it - although this latest summer was rather bad when the temperatures here in Hyderabad soared to 45 C/ 113 F and the monsoon seemed to take forever to kick in.

Now, we do use a water based "Cooler" in the worst spells of summer, but having gone through four Hyderabad summers without ACs I can attest to how difficult it is to hold out and keep this resolution. We might not make it through a fifth season, so I can hardly preach this gospel. I certainly cannot preach it to someone living in Mumbai or Chennai, where a bad summer (or even a sticky, humid monsoon season) can sap the will to live out of us coddled middle-classers... So much for that idea then!

What are communities to do? Forget the 70% of Indians who can't afford an AC (yet) anyway... the remaining 30% want air conditioning as badly as they want a first or second car, bigger the better. India has already gone from viewing TV and land-line phones as a luxury (c. 1985) to TVs and cellphones being more prevalent in slums than proper toilets (c. 2010). You had to live in an Indian city in 2003 to see how much of a status symbol air conditioning was then, and you have to live in one today to see how easily ACs have gone from that to being "essential" for most yuppies.

If you're expecting the neighborhood to come together and ban air conditioning, don't hold your breath. Indians will stop using spices in our cooking sooner than that!

That unfortunately just leaves us with (shudders!) the government as an agent of problem solving.

So what can governments do? The obvious options -

• Reduce population drastically - non-starter clearly :-) (but oh, but they do try valiantly). The most governments can do, like China with it's one child policy, is discourage larger families and slow population growth. But slowing growth does nothing to address the large mass of 1.3 B people we already have in India (or the 7B crowding the planet overall already)
• Increase conventional energy production? Nuclear - Chernobyl and Fukushima notwithstanding - is the only realistic supply option at the moment, and as the NYT reports, the Indo-American nuclear deal is really going nowhere in adding any supply to Indian markets any time soon.
• Fund/ give incentives for non-conventional energy production? Geo-thermal, solar, wind, bio-mass, wave power are all nice ideas but years from practical use.

Obvious and impractical then! What are some of the subtler options available then? Actually scratch that... if there's one thing world history shows us, it is that government policy is more often than not a blunt instrument. Governments understand only two ways to 'encourage' economic behavior - proscription, and taxation. (Or maybe they'll be creative and proscribe through taxation!).

Since banning air conditioning seems a) impossible, and b) most likely counterproductive, the only option remaining on the government table is to tax the usage of ACs.

My own rather blunt instrument of a mind then comes up with these blunt ideas:

1. Make air-conditioning more expensive via a tax. Any resulting revenues should be sequestered and funneled into alternative energy research. (Yes, there's a cynical Mr Hyde in my head going "fat lot of good that'll do!")
2. Provide incentives (tantalizingly lower property and other taxes?) on buildings that are greener, and more importantly do not use air conditioning, and minimize power utilization
3. Bill power usage for air conditioning separately and at a premium (separate meters for ACs). This might encourage people to switch ACs off except at the worst of times in a year. 
4. A whole separate sub-grid for ACs? One that can be switched off the minute there's a shortage in available power?
5. Make it illegal for residential ACs to be hooked up to diesel generators that most large Indian communities use these days in cases of power failure - only allowance being made for public buildings and hospitals 
6. Encourage localized as opposed to central air conditioning in residential buildings

I know, I know... it's all a bit heavy-handed big-government stuff that wont work, says the cynic, but I do think we're in dire straits with this problem. Desperate times, and all that...

But enough from me... what does everyone else think? Are there already good ideas floating around in the vast aether of the web hinting at a solution to this conundrum?

Or are we, as I often suspect, righteously screwed? Is it time to meekly, 'un-conditionedly' surrender to our fate?