Here in California, where winters are generally mild, and summers are hot unless you live in the right places, air conditioning can be crucial in the summertime.
Before air conditioning, it was traditional to either go to the coast, where summer water temps are all of 53'F and a strong north wind provides a seriously chilling relief from the interior heat, or to the mountains where temperatures drop 5 degrees for every 1000 feet of elevation. This is why people rent mountain cabins, usually beside lakes, and a big part of why Lake Tahoe is so popular for family vacations. You can get away from the heat without an air conditioner.
If you can't get away, due to business or stricken by poverty, you tend to find other ways to beat the heat, or try and ignore it. The best answer to this is to minimize your air conditioning use in the hottest part of the day, or sleep through the afternoons. Rising early with dawns light allows you to do many outdoor activities in great comfort, including the usual dog walking, strolling, exercise, cycling, and even gardening or heavy labor before the sun rises and the temperatures with it.
On the far side of the heat of the day, grilling your food and outdoor dining are both welcome, provided you live away from mosquitoes. This is also why Californians are fond of wine, of India Pale Ale (IPA), and decks. We love our gardens because we can enjoy them in the early morning, and the cooling evening. They're just miserably hot in the heat of the day.
Someday, the price of oil will affect electrical power, and the current trend is unscheduled blackouts. This is unwelcome. This is also why many people receive offers from the power company for a tiny discount to the power rate in order to remotely shut off your Air Conditioner. If you're young and poor, this might be okay, but if you're elderly and poor it might kill you. Of course, even with this ability in place, rolling blackouts due to demand might someday become scheduled blackouts, and those might eventually evolve from Outages to On-Ages. An Onage is when your power is scheduled to be on, rather than off, which becomes its new normal. At that point, you'd better have a lot of solar panels, big batteries to store the power, and clever use of both night cooling, fans, hydration, and probably siesta to get through it. Until such time as the next Ice Age comes, our future is going to strongly resemble our past, a place with no air conditioning, lots of poverty, and making the best of things.
At least we have good wine and beer. In such times, instead of claiming America has a drinking problem, which is the next target of attack now that govt has banned self defense, and is making cars too expensive, and taxed cigarettes into being a luxury item, next it can ban alcohol "for your own good" because govt controls your health care. Did you forget the nature of govt? Ban booze and make you crazy from the heat. That doesn't sound very nice. I think perhaps America has a problem with self sufficiency. It has a problem with dependence on bad advice and celebrity rather than thinking for themselves.
I think I'll look for a book on scooter repair next time I'm at the library. I might learn something useful. And retain a way to get around without sweating hard up the mountainside, twice a day. Its hard to keep a job when you stink. Remember that when you start adapting to unreliable power, and hot summers.
No comments:
Post a Comment