Nolte: New York Times Wants Ban on ‘Sexist’ Air Conditioning

Air conditioning is a sexist and unnecessary luxury that’s killing the planet, according to the New York Times.

This is what a Luddite looks like. This is what a backwards, anti-science, anti-progress, spoiled, imperialist, bullying bigot of a Luddite looks like. This, right here.

You know, we always laugh at this whackery; we always dismiss it and write it off to left-wing lunacy that no sane country will ever allow … and then the next thing you know men are marrying men, mentally ill men in skirts are sharing restrooms with our daughters, and we’re all being forced to bake their goddamned wedding cakes as the next Democrat nominee for the president promises to open the borders and confiscate our guns.

The left — and by the left I include the media — are already coming for our guns, our health insurance, our private schools, our churches, our automobiles, our backyard grills, and now they want to take away our cooled air.

So this is nothing to laugh at. Yesterday’s insanity almost always becomes tomorrow’s reality. The Luddites are dead serious. And this is not the first time the far-Left Times has come for our A/C, and it won’t be the last.

You see, per the pro-science New York Times, were we to rid ourselves of air conditioning, over time we would not miss it, we wouldn’t even notice it’s gone because we are pampered Americans who have become acclimated:

People in countries with lower G.D.P.s, said David Lehrer, the communications director and a researcher there, are more comfortable with a wider range of temperatures. It appears that first world discomfort is a learned behavior.

Besides, air conditioning is sexist:

There is an oft-cited study published in Nature.com that notes how building temperatures, once set to the comfort preferences of 1960s-era men in suits, disregard the “thermal comfort” of female staffers.

Come summer, Twitter invariably lights up with charges that air-conditioning is sexist, an engine of the patriarchy, in threads that in turn fire up conservative commentators eager to prove the daftness of the opposition.

Building temperatures are largely controlled by building managers, to industry standards that aim for the thermal comfort of 80 percent of a building’s occupants — which means, of course, that 20 percent will be uncomfortable, if not miserable.

And air conditioning is wounding Mother Gaia:

On an overheated planet, air-conditioning becomes more and more desirable, solving in the short term the problem it helped create.

You know…

I could spend all kinds of time citing how air conditioning has improved, not only the comfort of those fortunate to be blessed by this miracle, but our health and well-being. Imagine the life expectancy of newborns and the elderly, those on the fragile edge of starting and ending life, if they had no air conditioning.

I could spend just as much time talking about how much more over-crowded the population centers in the Northern United States would be if the miracle of air conditioning did not make it possible for people to move to places like Arizona and Florida.

I could talk about productivity, not just in air conditioned workplaces, but in schools; how climate control makes it easier to concentrate on our work and how the benefits of this move beyond education and into a market where goods and services are more affordable and the workday more bearable.

I could talk about the Times’s bigotry, about these Northern leftists who never write think pieces like this about central heating, about their beloved radiators and furnaces. Of course not. These provincial blue-state bigots need their heat as badly as the mostly red states South needs its air conditioning…

And what these bigots will never-ever-ever tell you is their desire to stay warm eats up four times as much energy as our desire to stay cool.

Yes, it’s true… All the arguments the Times uses against air conditioning could be flipped around against heating. In fact, when it comes to burning fossil fuels, it is an even more potent argument, four times more potent, but never would these blue state zealots ever contemplate such a thing.

I could talk about the fact that there is no escaping the heat. About how if you’re cold, you can always pile on the clothes and blankets until you’re comfortable  But if you’re hot, there’s nothing you can do. This is almost certainly why people are more likely to commit suicide during a heat wave.

I could remind the Times of Chicago 1995 and that brutal heatwave that killed 739 people in just one week, mostly the elderly who could not afford air conditioning. I remember this harrowing week because I remember how my wife managed to locate an air conditioner for her mother and get it installed in her Chicago apartment so she could get out of the bathtub.

I could tell my own story about how I grew up in a hot and sticky swamp called Wisconsin and how I was 20 years-old before I discovered the difference between sleeping with air condition and not. About how I was 47 before I knew the pleasures of living with central air conditioning and how it’s dramatically improved the quality of life for myself and my ailing wife.

I could point out the countless lives saved in third world countries  and the countless lives that will continue to be saved as air conditioning becomes cheaper and more accessible.

I could point out how imperialist it is for an elitist newspaper to launch a jihad against this vital and necessary progress for these countries, about how this is just one more example of rich, white, American leftists desperate to stop other cultures from progressing out of the Dark Ages.

Banning air conditioning would be every bit as reckless as banning polio or measles vaccines — a political act of terrorism.

I could go through all that; lay out those facts, all the science and, yes, the compassion behind the necessity of air conditioning, but all I really want to say is… Go fuck yourself, Gray Lady.

 Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.