The cooling conundrum

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2022

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Global warming means the world will need a lot more air conditioning - but will the AC just make global warming even worse?

The Middle East already experiences peak temperatures over 50C, as the Kuwaiti social media influencer Ascia Alshammiri testifies. And things are only set to get worse. Ed Butler speaks to climatologist George Zittis, who says urban temperatures could hit 60C later this century, which combined with rising humidity could render some places uninhabitable.

In any case, it means a boom for the air conditioning industry. But AC itself is a major source of greenhouse gases, as Radhika Lalit of clean energy think tank RMI explains. So are there tech solutions available to break this vicious circle? We hear from two entrepreneurs - Kevin O'Toole of Exergyn, and Aaswath Raman of SkyCool Systems.

(Picture: Congested air conditioning units on a building in Mumbai, India; Credit: Kuni Takahashi/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, keeping cool as the planet warms. The air conditioning crisis, we aren't discussing enough.
0:12.1	With increasing population, rapid urbanisation and a warming planet, you are going to expect an exponential growth in demand for cooling over the next three
0:22.8	decades. And it's a vicious circle. The hotter it gets, the more AC we're all going to need.
0:29.2	You end up with a positive feedback loop. The more of this stuff you use to cool more people,
0:33.2	the more you release into the atmosphere. Therefore, the hotter it gets and the more people
0:36.7	have to use it, and you just go on and on and on. So what is the answer? We offer a few cool ideas here on Business Daily
0:44.0	from the BBC. This is the hottest I've ever seen Kuwait. It is getting to the point where it's really
1:01.9	unbearable and I feel like everything about living here is hostile sometimes. Asha al-Shemiri
1:08.9	lives in Kuwait and some days she really wishes she didn't.
1:14.6	The heat impacts your life in ways that you don't necessarily anticipate. It sucks the life out of you. It goes like this. On a day today, it makes things that are supposed to be a minute long, an hour long.
1:25.8	Managing the heat defines her routine.
1:28.9	Normally, I like to start my days off with a dog walk.
1:32.3	We need to make it super early so that my little fur baby can walk on the ground without
1:37.3	burning himself.
1:38.5	The hours between 11 in the morning until around 4 o'clock in the afternoon are no-go times for being outdoors.
1:46.4	But now she has more than just a dog to worry about. She's become a mother.
1:51.2	One of the things that I was not anticipating when I did finally have children was now I had
1:56.3	this tiny little being that needed to be protected from the sun. And because I had rear-facing car seats,
2:03.4	the AC unit actually never touched his car seat. So we would turn the car on 30 minutes prior to
2:09.8	an outing, put the ice packs into his car seat to cool it down before I could place him in it.
2:14.2	And then we had a tube that would extend from the front AC into the back
2:19.1	just to make sure that we could get him enough air conditioning in a rear-facing car seat. And
	...

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