The summer
season is here and the predominant thought in our minds is ‘how to stay cool’?
While some years back, we would have considered a variety of traditional ways
to beat the heat, today the most common option, at least in our cities, is to
install an air conditioner in the house.
Not only does it actually cool down your home, metaphorically too it is
‘cool’ to install an appliance like this – owning an air conditioner pushes up
your social status!
Today, in India,
we can actually see the rapid increase in the use of air conditioners all
around us; the statistics too corroborate this fact. For example, last summer
(May 2013) Panasonic announced that it had crossed the milestone of one million
air conditioner sales in India since entering the country in 2008. In other
words, a single company added a million air conditioners to our country in just
5 years!
But are air
conditioners really ‘cool’? The unfortunate answer is no! Believe it or not,
air conditioners are one of the big contributors to global warming. So while
they may cool down our homes, they are actually heating up the planet!
Refrigerants — the
fluids that absorb and release heat efficiently at the right temperatures — are
the key to air conditioning. Until recently, the most common refrigerants
used in air conditioners were chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). However, the
discovery that CFCs were major contributors to the depletion of the ozone layer
led to the creation of the ‘Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the
Ozone Layer’, which came into effect in 1989. The Montreal Protocol has managed
to substantially reduce, and in some countries even to eliminate, the use of
CFCs.
The CFCs were then
replaced by hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), which have a greatly reduced
impact on ozone depletion. Today, from HCFCs we have moved on to HFCs
(hydrofluorocarbons) which have no impact on ozone depletion because they do
not contain chlorine. Unfortunately, the bad news still continues! It has now
become known that HFCs are super-greenhouse gases with a high potential to
contribute to global warming.
The frightening
part is that we now seem to be trapped in a vicious circle. We use air
conditioners to fight the heat, air conditioners contribute to global warming,
global warming is pushing up temperatures and making summers extreme, the
hotter it gets the more we turn to air conditioners – this is a story that can
have no happy ending!
The only
solution is to break out of this cycle by saying no to air conditioners and
returning to the traditional ways of staying cool in the summer. For hundreds
of generations people managed happily without air conditioners, why can’t we?
