Cooling from air conditioning saves lives — more than 5,000 a year in the United States alone — but it also heats up the planet and taxes our electrical grid, scientists say.
As the world warms, heat waves strike nearly every continent and United Nations officials estimate that about half a million people die a year from heat, air conditioning is needed and being used more than ever. “It leads to more carbon emissions … then it accelerates the climate warming problem. The most lives saved were in Arizona, Florida, Texas, Louisiana and southern parts of Nevada, Alabama and Mississippi. But it also found that has to be balanced with “overuse. He pointed to offices — like his — which are cooled so much that many workers wear sweaters even in the summer.
A study in Nature Health reported Monday that air conditioning saved nearly 58,000 lives between 2010 and 2020 in the U.S. In the new study, Chen and his team went through 30 million U.S. death records over an 11-year time span, used county-by-county calculations for levels when heat becomes dangerous and calculated how many lives air conditioning saved during extreme heat. More than a dozen northern states, from Washington to Maine, had fewer than 10 lives a year saved, according to the study.
Air conditioning use is skyrocketing around the world, with electricity demand from cooling expected to triple, according to the International Energy Agency and the United Nations Environment Programme. “Everyone knows air conditioning works, but air conditioning from a climate change perspective is not an ideal,” said Kai Chen, an epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public Health who was the senior author on the new study. Chen said the study concluded that “the essential role” of air conditioning saved on average 5,267 lives a year. More than half the cases researchers looked at could be considered overuse, he said. He also said the study found that using more air conditioning than needed doesn’t save more lives, but it does worsen climate change.
