Stan Cox Email & Phone Number

About Losing Our CoolAs the Earth’s atmosphere continues to warm, researchers and planners are already anticipating the need for greater air-conditioning capacity. Social-justice advocates are warning that people without access to cooling power will face serious health risks. Electric utilities are bracing for higher peak demand. But few are emphasizing that air conditioning has become a top contributor to the very problem of climate change that it is being relied upon to address. Refrigerated air conditioning has become integrated so fully into society that simple lectures on green morality would do little to bring consumption down. If alternative means to comfort are to gain a foothold on the environmental agenda, we have to see air conditioning with new eyes, to start from scratch, examine it as we would a new technology, and follow its impacts, both upstream and downstream. This fresh examination of air conditioning leads into diverse realms of human experience: the thermodynamic corner into which modern economies have painted themselves; the positive-feedback loop that joins air conditioning to climate change; ecological damage to landscapes, which goes far beyond simple carbon emissions; air conditioning as a potent economic stimulant; the weird world of air conditioning and health; the transformation of communities worldwide in the age of air conditioning; the role of air conditioning in changing America’s political hue; and new technologies and ideas for reducing air conditioning’s energy consumption or eliminating the refrigerated environment altogether.Losing Our Cool will be published in spring 2010 byThe New Press.

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  Iowa State University

  Plant Breeding And Cytogenetics