I’ve recently learned that sainthood is in order for a man I’ve only just learned existed. There is a man out there whose thing is opposing air conditioning. We all have our things, and this is his.
Stan Cox, author of a 2010 book about the evils of air conditioning, is for some reason in 2024 the author of a New York Times op-ed about you guessed it. Cox doesn’t use air conditioning himself, except when he does:
I’ll admit, we run our house’s ancient central air system for two or three days each summer, usually when we have dinner guests or out-of-town visitors. During heat waves — such as the one that gripped the middle of the country this week, when temperatures rose above 100 degrees and our brains became heat-addled and the sheets sweat-soaked — we deploy a portable air-conditioner in the bedroom overnight. But this week was just the second time we’ve turned it on this year.
This is male for ‘I never wear makeup except mascara and a bit of Botox but I’m not high-maintenance like those other girls.’
Cox’s environmental case against a/c isn’t as clear-cut as he seems to think. But this isn’t about the environment. It’s about purity. It’s a big ol’ ad for Stan Cox, Minimalist.
To keep us going through the rest of the summer, we rely on electric fans, which consume only about 2 percent of the energy needed to air-condition one room….Our June electric bill informed us that we’d used 80 percent less electricity than other homes in our town with similar (in our case, modest) square footage.
See here I was, worried he lived in a McMansion.
Dishwashers are double trouble, putting out heat and humidity. We don’t have one.
Here I can only echo the (one sensible) NYT commenter and say, without knowing if it’s actually justified, his poor wife. If he’s not doing every last dish I want his op-ed retracted I don’t care about freedom of speech or the press of any of that, this is if anything too light of a punishment.
“[W]e dry our laundry on the clothesline out back.”
Lol of course you (plural) do.
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