Like Zionism itself, the air conditioner is also a marvel that harms its environment
Israelis are proud of their air conditioners and look down with disdain at Europeans who insist on sweating, but this technology has devastating environmental effects
By Ofri Ilany*
Imagine the average temperature in the Israeli summer shooting up by two degrees in the near future. This is not an imaginary scenario, but a reality that is expected to materialise in our lifetime under the impact of climate change. It is frightening, and yet most of us are able to imagine in our minds how we could live even in these conditions. But now imagine another scenario: your air conditioner will stop working forever, and there will be no one to fix it. The home or office will become a steaming, humid greenhouse like the outside world. Now comes the real panic. Such a reality is terrifying, and even inconceivable.
Because the truth must be told: the average Israeli from the middle or upper class has long been detached from the surrounding climate. Most of us live in a space where a more or less stable temperature is maintained. It is said that Israel is a warm country, but for most of us it is rather cold. Israeli spaces — offices, homes, shopping centres — are as cold as Finland, and are only getting colder and colder. Many people do not even feel the scorching Israeli summer — they move between the air conditioner in the house and the air conditioner in the car. Therefore, when talking about the future situation in the age of climate change, the discussion cannot be detached from the question of technology. The latest UN report has made it clear that apocalyptic climate change can still be prevented, but devastating global warming is already inevitable. In view of that, what will determine the fate of every single one of us in the coming years would be the climate outside. But it will also be determined by the technology we have to face it
The era of warming places the air conditioner as an essential technology. Obviously, the effects of climate change go far beyond rising temperatures, and also involve droughts, floods, fires and rising sea levels. Still, the future world will be dramatically divided between those who have the pleasure of air conditioning — and those who wouldn’t. We prefer to talk about exciting developments of our time like artificial intelligence or space travel, but in fact the air conditioner is much more important. The people who will survive the catastrophe are the ones who would build themselves an air-conditioned Noah’s Ark.
The social history of air conditioning has only begun to be written in recent years. Until recently nobody hardly noticed the way the air conditioner affected the way of life in the developed world and also expanded its boundaries. The first device that resembled contemporary air conditioners was built in the early 20th century, but it was another half century before it became a mass-distributed appliance, mostly in America. Initially air conditioners were restricted to certain buildings, such as movie theatres. This is also one of the explanations for the great popularity of cinema in the 1950s. But gradually the air conditioner became an essential part of the American way of life. The air conditioners also changed the distribution of the population in the United States. They made it possible to establish set up massive communities and large cities in places where it was difficult to live in the past — the deserts of Arizona, California and New Mexico.
Moreover, air conditioners have irreversibly changed the landscape and reshaped the public space. The rise of the high-tech industry would not have been possible without air conditioning. But air conditioners also had other effects. The air-conditioned human is a domestic animal. The fear of leaving the cool space is one of the explanations for the crisis of mass politics and the lack of mass party rallies of the kind that was so familiar in the mid-20th century.
Now, under the influence of the prolonged heat waves, the air conditioner market is expanding rapidly around the world. But the environmental impacts of this technology are devastating. Air conditioners make the outside world even hotter and more polluted. Air conditioning also dramatically illustrates the inequality in world living conditions. In Japan and the United States there is air conditioning in 90 per cent of homes, in Israel in 95 per cent, but in hot India — only in 5 per cent of homes. There are also those who insist on being without air conditioning. The Germans, may be purchasing more air conditioners than in the past, but the vast majority still eschew them, and see it as a wasteful American technology.
Closing the windows
The average Israeli looks down with disdain at the Europeans’ refusal to use air conditioning. Some describe it as another form of “European naivety” — like the willingness of Europeans to accept Muslim immigrants. Israelis are proud of their freezing air conditioners, almost as much as their Merkava tank or the high-tech industry. Like our friend Dubai, we are air conditioner nation. There is sometimes talk of Israel’s integration into the Mediterranean region. But the air conditioner sealed the Israeli space and insulated it in a private space. Once air conditioning is on the scene in massive numbers, who bothers to emulate the song about sitting on the veranda and counting migratory birds?
Today there is nothing more Israeli than an air conditioner. Because what is the air conditioner? A technology that cools a limited sealed space. This marvel has two side effects: One is that while cooling the inner space, it heats and pollutes the space around it. The second is that all windows must be shut for this to work. Isn’t this a perfect allegory for Zionism? The State of Israel is a political regime that has managed to create optimal conditions for an exclusive group. But at the same time, it wreaked havoc around it, creating refugee camps and developing weapons systems and legal means to seal his borders. Israel, therefore, is the state of the air conditioner.
But it was not always like that. It is important to remember that the mass use of air conditioners gained momentum only in the 1980s. Many of us have lived in a much less air-conditioned world. As a child I lived in the arid southern region of the Arava, and yet we hardly used the air conditioner, in part because it was appallingly noisy. My parents’ car also did not have air conditioning, and we would drive with an open window. In general, in the first decades of the state’s existence, people lived and prospered even without air conditioning. They wore light clothes, used fans and parasols, or had a siesta in the afternoon. But all this belongs to history.
* Translated by Sol Salbe for the Middle East News Service, Melbourne, Australia.
