A  town in India this month saw temperatures exceed 123 degrees Fahrenheit.  This event helps explain rather dramatically why, as the climate heats up and electricity is more available in developing  countries, the world is forecast to install 700 million air conditioners.  It is not just for comfort but at this heat level a health necessity.

In just 15 years, urban areas of China went from just a few percentage points of air conditioning penetration to over 100 percent — “i.e. more than one room air conditioner (AC) per urban household,” according to a recent report on the global AC boom by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And air conditioner sales are now increasing in India, Indonesia and Brazil by between 10 and 15 percent per year.  India, a nation of 1.25 billion people, had just 5 percent air conditioning penetration in the year 2011.   It will be the world’s biggest growth market.

There is a close relationship between household income and air conditioner adoption, with ownership increasing 2.7 percentage points per $1,000 of annual household income. Mexico in particular, expects a stupendous growth of air conditioning over the 21st century, from 13 percent to as much as 81 percent of homes acquiring it.  With it will come a huge extra source of emissions.

Alarmed  at the implications, scientists are now trying to make conditioners more energy efficient, and less dependent on HFCs or hydrofluorocarbons as refrigerants that act as an extremely powerful greenhouse gas. The aim is to achieve a 25 to 30 percent improvement in efficiency, which is a feasible target and would make a big  difference to peak demand for electricity. Something called “mini-split air conditioners” are already available today in Korea, offering a 50 percent gain in  energy efficiency over traditional products.  Even 30 percent more efficient air conditioners, (and the phase out HFCs at the same time), could effectively offset the construction of as many as 1,550 peak power plants.

Cumulatively, by 2050,  given the greater efficiency, the world could avoid 98 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. That figure represents 10 percent of the roughly 1,000 billion tons of CO2 that we could still emit from the year 2011 forward, according to scientists, and still have the possibility of keeping the planet’s warming below the target of 2 degrees Celsius. (Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, New Scientist, May 31, 2016).

My own, un- scientific, observation is that people with air conditioning often seem to leave it on all day while they are out at work, hoping, no doubt, to return to a cool house. There ought to be an electronic system that turns the cooling off when you lock the front door as you leave, and on again when you return.  Some people are extraordinarily wasteful and unaware of their effect on the environment.  When I first went to America I noticed how carelessly power is used – because it is cheap.  Not so in Britain, where electricity bills are a political issue.   There, air conditioners are rare, but for how long as summers get warmer?