Hello everyone and welcome to the Future of Cooling podcast.
If you're here for the first time, let me introduce myself.
I'm your host, Antonella Matsuno, a research associate at the Future of Cooling Programme at Oxford.
Martin's Cool.
The Future of Cooling programme is advancing research on transitioning technologies and cooling cultures and behaviours that determine energy demand.
The implications of severe heat for mobility and the potential to mitigate negative health effects.
And mapping the impacts of global cooling production networks, including refrigerant gases.
Here with us today, we have Eric Dion Wilson, writer, teacher and poet pursuing a Ph.D. in environmental humanities.
He recently published a must read book called After Calling on Freedom, Global Warming and the Terrible Costs of Conflict.
The book is an acclaimed success with great reviews and a feature in the journal Science.
Quoting the article, Wilson weaves together the story of the invention of mechanical cooling and Freon,
with a recollection from a recent trip with a friend's son whose job is to find, purchase and arrange for the destruction of CCS.
The catch. Almost all the sellers are hostile to climate considerations and the concept of destroying something useful.
Son must win the trust of the sellers without revealing that the ozone depleting super greenhouse gas chemicals will be eliminated.
Eric This is perhaps one of the most needed books of our times.
Can you tell us how this project came about? Absolutely.
So before I began writing this book, I didn't know anything about air conditioning.
I'd grown up in the American South in a highly air conditioned environment,
loved it, and moved to New York City, where I used air conditioning extensively.
It's funny, I have a lot of people who've read the book now who have just assumed that I hate
air conditioning and that I had or have never lived in a very hot environment.
And both are false. And it came about with a relationship with the the the sort of main character, if you will, of the book Sin.
A close friend of mine is a close friend of mine. And I began talking with him about his work because I was curious about it.
And when he was describing it,
it sounded so utterly bizarre to me and unusual for somebody who considered himself and on the left concerned with environmental issues,
also a business person.
He was talking to people, as you pointed out, who were quite hostile to the idea of global warming and working with people on the left.
And so even more than that, the actual work that he was doing with cap and trade, which I'm highly critical of.
I thought it was interesting that he was talking with people with very different conceptions of the world than him.
And in the United States, where it's become a kind of truism that we're more polarised politically than ever.
Here was a story of a man who was driving around the United States destroying this global warming gas
that nobody thought was still around anymore and also talking to people across the political divide.
So I knew that even if it were just a magazine profile, which I thought it was going to be initially, there was an interesting story there.
And as I began interviewing Sam and it occurred to me that I needed to know about the history of air conditioning.
Little did I know, and maybe if I did, I wouldn't have embarked on this project in the first place.
That the history of air conditioning is also really a history of industrialisation
and the history of modernism and the United States of the 20th century.
And so and there is a, you know, some use in not not limiting my research at first,
although it became a gargantuan project and a kind of history, kind of niche history of the United States.
And the reason why it's a focus on the United States is because air conditioning was kind of born and bred in the United States and for a very,
very long time. This is changing now, as you know, but for a very, very long time.
The United States was really the prime example of comfort, cooling and so much so that, you know, through parts of the day,
the 20th century Europe often made fun of the United States for being so air conditioned and for things like demanding ice cubes.
And I remember even in the nineties I went to, I think it was Paris with my parents,
and my dad was appalled that you couldn't get a glass of ice water in July.
He thought it was uncivilised. And so, you know, even in 1988, this was something that I had personal experience with that like,
you know, in July in Memphis, you wouldn't serve somebody a glass of water without ice.
And it seems like a minor a minor cultural difference.
But I think what I tried to do with the book was to try to see a real ideological
schism in that expectation of ice water and that expectation of air conditioning.
And I was curious, where did that come from? What are the effects of that and how did it support other ideologies?
And so that's that's kind of a broad overview of how this project came to be.
Yeah. Thank you. So fascinating. Especially to understand like how culture is intertwined with our everyday practises.
So for example, do you have in mind some of the cultural influences that might have shaped our need for cooling and our need for refrigeration?
Definitely. One thing that I was really surprised to find in researching this was that that the industrialised world,
the West, hasn't really hungered for the kind of air conditioned environment that we think of today.
And one of the early story historical narratives of the book is of Dr. John Gorrie, a Florida doctor who.
Pretty much invented air conditioning as early as the 1840s.
It was clunky, but the and maybe expensive.
He hadn't quite worked out the engineering feat of it, but he did work out the physics of mechanical cooling and tried to shop at around
two people and nobody wanted to invest in it and nobody was really interested in it.
And they thought it was too strange and too complicated and culturally bizarre.
And because a lot of the American South at the time was a kind of stiff upper lip attitude to discomfort,
and the 19th century relationship with comfort started with discomfort was was
aligned closely with an aristocracy and it was kind of character building.
And one thing that I learnt from some great historians that we have read about this is that that started to really change around the world,
World War One. But a lot of the horrors of the war and coming back eroded the sense that discomfort
was character building and there was a real cultural embrace of of comfort.
This was aligned with a lot of technologies, a lot of push button technologies,
and the celebration of the mechanisation of things as a kind of sign of progress.
So it's not just air conditioning, of course. It's a lot of other things.
Yeah. So I was surprised to find that that air conditioning aided mass production
and really wasn't about comfort until World War Two and after World War Two,
two things happened that really convinced the American public of a desire for education, and those were the post-war housing boom.
So houses and modern architecture houses begin to be made that required air conditioning.
Now, increasingly, that's seen as poor design.
But things like larger windows, poorly designed insulation.
Low cost building materials. So this is the age in the 19 late forties and fifties of mass produced housing, prefabricated housing.
And because they had the technology of air conditioning, they didn't need to design with the given climate in mind.
And so this is kind of modernisation in a nutshell.
Any place could be any other place. And this is something that we experienced so commonly today that we often don't think about it.
If you go to a Starbucks in Alaska, it's the same as a Starbucks in Phoenix.
And that is a really unique experience in human history.
It's experienced. It's barely a hundred years old. And and to me, that is kind of that apex of modernism, that is modernism.
That one place could be everywhere else that you actually didn't need the unique properties of a given locale.
And it's something that is so seductive to us because it aids things like industrialism and AIDS, things like like the flow of capital,
that it's really hard for us to untangle ourselves from that convenience, the inconvenience of weather, inconvenience of climax.
So that was the first thing and the materials of and the way that housing was being built.
And the second thing was advertising Madison Avenue had a huge effect on this.
This is an idea I got from a great historian named Gail Cooper and and another one named Andrea Santini,
who they analysed air conditioning ads from the forties and fifties.
There is a real uncomfortable alliance with the eugenics industry, which was something that really surprised me.
The air conditioning ads often aligned air conditioning with whiteness and with certain middle class professionalism.
And one of them shows a white businessman sweating at his desk and.
Not getting his work done and worried that the immigrants are going to take over his job.
And then in a next panel, it shows him with in front of an air conditioner able to efficiently work.
No longer afraid that the immigrants are going to outpace him.
Sometimes these ads nonsensically also included the suggestion that prior
civilisations where the immigrants were coming from were lazy because of heat.
And so they kind of included a nonsensical logic of being both lazy and so productive that they were going to take your job.
And so they really preyed on these fears that actually came down to work.
Work culture and air conditioning was still in the fifties.
I would argue not quite an argument for comfort, so much as comfort in order to rest so that you can work better the next day.
So it was really all still in service to profit. It was all related to work.
And this is something that it's not pursued as much in the book,
but I think is is a real question for us who are thinking about the future of cooling,
which is that I think that it's tied up into our assumptions about productivity and work culture,
and I'm not sure that we can really address one without addressing the other.
And that's a huge, huge Gordian knot of the problem.
But I think that it's something that we can see that has sort of always been intertwined with cooling is cooling in order to keep going.
Cooling in order to keep working because the civilisation or the cultural alternatives to that were things like the siesta or not working as hard.
And these are things that conserve energy and make sure that you don't overheat.
And they're quite effective at and at mitigating heat deaths, for instance.
But they also make it so that you're not producing as much or not generating as much money.
So I think that that's something really important to consider.
Very interesting topic.
Eric, you have explained really well the origins of cooling as tightly linked to modernity and productivity rather than comfort,
especially in the early days. Well, so very interesting, the concept of cooling linked to eugenics and racism.
I'd like to ask you a question.
As the world is getting hotter and hotter, do you think that we're going in the same direction in the sense of climate racism?
It's such a good question and such a difficult question to answer.
And I'm not sure I think that one thing that that is helpful and is crucial and and one of the things I tried
to do in this book is to try to look at the the extent to which comfort has been constructed historically.
And not to say that we don't have our limits or that comfort is all an illusion or something like that, that's not what I mean.
But that our our cultural expectations of comfort are defined by, in part by the industry and the culture in which we live.
And we know this because they are different, vastly different cultures that have different expectations for comfort,
and that influences whether we feel comfortable or not. In a similar way.
I feel like the crucial thing is to understand their construction of whiteness and not to really.
It's disturbing to me how often the and often whiteness is kind of still talked about in sort of essentialist terms,
even from well-meaning people who are using the language of diversity and inclusion, which is often very problematic.
And that the the the point is not to include people of as many different reasons as possible,
and just that it's to understand how whiteness was constructed in the first place
and to understand that that is that is a social construct that has materials.
And I still don't think that we're necessarily going in the right direction on that,
certainly not in the United States, where critical race theory is trying to be banned in certain states.
Here, you cannot even teach that, which is a indication of just how terrifying some people find that the pushback that I've
gotten from random people on social media about the book has been really interesting to see.
I found that during the right after the book came out, my father called me and said,
I have a friend who watches Fox News who said that your name appeared on Fox News.
And I said, Are you sure it was me? I did not believe.
And I did some sleeping and found out that I was the book was sorry, not the book,
but a Times piece related to the book about air conditioning and the way that air conditioning can and can.
Go hand in hand with systemic racism. I wish I could say more in a second, but was quoted on the Ingram Hour something.
I didn't even know what that was at the time. But Laura Ingraham, a right wing conservative pundit on Fox News, had said, my name included this piece.
So after that, I got all of these. DMS and messages on social media from people saying it with expletives,
saying I was an idiot and making fun of me for calling air conditioning racist.
And of course, I wasn't saying air conditioning is racist.
It's a reductive term, but I mean something that is ignored and that reduction is something that happened in the book two summers ago,
which I feel like illustrates the way that systemic racism and inequality around air conditioning goes hand-in-hand.
And so two years ago, there was a heat wave in New York City, which often doesn't get that hot.
It does experience the urban heat island effect, which can have devastating effects across the city.
But it's not a place like Phoenix or Las Vegas or something like that.
So it's a problem usually only a few weeks out of the year. And so two years ago there was a heat wave.
And first of all, looking at a map of the city,
and if you look at the city in terms of racial demographics and in interms of income level and in terms of greenspace,
all of those things match up pretty neatly.
So places that tend to be more working class and black and brown neighbourhoods also
tend to be the neighbourhoods that have less shade and have less access to greenspace.
It's not that difficult to understand why, because the city does not put in, does not invest in infrastructure,
and that makes these parts of the city prettier because they don't make the city enough money.
And it also makes the best parts of those neighbourhoods of the city hotter.
And during the heat wave there had actually a week before there had been a blackout in Manhattan.
And that was, to my knowledge, kind of random.
It was a it was a faulty technical error.
And it caused several hours of blackout in Times Square and the city lost millions of dollars and in just a few hours because of that.
And so it was already terrified that this was going to happen again.
So a week later, there was a heat wave and and the the privatised energy company that has a monopoly over energy called Con Air,
and they deliberately shut off electricity to select neighbourhoods in order to, as they put it, preserve the integrity of the system as a whole.
The neighbourhoods that they chose were almost all neighbourhoods that were predominantly black and brown,
working class neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods that are very close to actually.
So this was something that did not happen in my neighbourhood.
It was something that was in close proximity to on days where the heat reached 105 degrees.
So I feel like that's a perfect example of the way that air conditioning is not even a short a good short term solution.
You have to have electricity to and to use it.
And when you are in a city that is often segregated by race and class and because of a legacy of redlining,
of denying access to housing, to black families, to Latino families,
and and there's a great book of this a book about this history of this called The Colour of Law,
that we're still living in the United States through a history of this redlining
that happened in the sixties and seventies and eighties and continues to happen.
When you get that, it becomes a lot easier.
Or rather, working class communities of colour are often in greater proximity to things like heat related vulnerability.
And and so it's very complex.
But that's a way in which systemic racism and an unequal access to affordable, reliable cooling,
whether that's mechanical cooling or passive cooling or what have you, can work hand-in-hand to exacerbate each other.
And. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I agree with you. Everything you said has been also mentioned in one of the papers that I recently read about
thermal injustice regarding specifically New York and heat waves and through GISS techniques,
they were able to identify the areas of the city that were hit the most.
And coincidentally, they are also the most vulnerable communities.
So the economically vulnerable. And so this makes you think how our modern way of working and living the city is exacerbating inequalities.
So if you think that white colours are comfortable in their offices and they're contributing
to dumping heat in the streets where poorer on always the less privilege people used to work.
And obviously you can see the dimension of this inequality and is with global warming is definitely going to be much worse.
And obviously the, the, the poorer neighbourhoods that are most affected by heat bubbles,
they also have the characteristic of having poor buildings or they often must and buildings do not have proper ventilations or green areas,
as in the case that the researchers found.
I can also think about the loss of culture and coping strategies that characterised cultures ancient populations,
for example, like meeting in piazzas or squares or green areas and spending the evening there chatting with their friends.
All of this relationality and sociality has gradually been lost with the enclosed meant of individuals.
And you also in your book, blame air conditioning for for that cultural change.
Can you explain a little bit better? What are the other cultural changes related to cooling?
Yeah. So one thing that did you know, just to review what you were saying or to emphasise what you were saying,
is that a lot of the strategies for heat mitigation prior to best air conditioning were very public and things like sleeping in a park.
And this is not utopian.
This happened and this happened in the 1950s in Chicago, and it happened in New York City.
People who lived close to. Greenspace or had access to the rooms and would often sleep there where it was cooler.
Because often buildings that are poorly designed in terms of ventilation and heat absorption are hottest
at night because they absorb all the sheet during the day and then they slowly release it at night.
So even after the sun has gone, building can be a lot hotter actually than outside air.
So this meant that summer in urban areas, certain urban areas,
not all of them in areas like Brownsville and Chicago in the 1950s, became a kind of festival atmosphere.
People were outside a lot more. It was hot inside to push people outside.
And there was, as you said, a real sociology that was created around this kind of a carnival festival atmosphere.
And so it created a sense of community, I would say.
It happened a lot in the South, too, where people would go to their porches, which were forward facing,
and they got to know each other that way because they were outside, because it was too hot inside.
And air conditioning changed a lot of this because it made the mitigation of heat more individual.
It was sort of every person for themselves. It relied on the technology.
You no longer had to share wisdom or ways of keeping cool.
You could just press the button that'll do it for you. Certainly a lot more convenient, but a lot of knowledge was lost.
And there was this assumption that if you were uncomfortable, it was your problem and you had to deal with it.
And something else that happened was that in the sixties, seventies and eighties, there was,
of course, a major rising crime in cities in the United States, but also elsewhere in Europe as well.
And so even if you didn't have air conditioning, the desire or even the name and the desire,
but the ability to sleep in a park say it became not an option.
Partially, it was it was dangerous, but also increased criminality of things like sleeping in parks.
You know, the criminalisation of homelessness, the criminalisation of vagrancy,
which is not a new thing, but has had a renewed lease on life really since the eighties.
So what I'm getting at here, really, I think, is that the real dwindling of public space,
of spaces that people could gather where you didn't have to buy anything, and especially at night spaces that were safe.
And we see this a lot in an elderly population that doesn't have air conditioning
either because they can't afford it or they don't want to pay the bills for it.
And the there's a reluctance to go to cooling centres, to public cooling centres because of fear of crime.
And sometimes that fear of crime is real. Sometimes it's sometimes it's paranoia.
But either way, I feel like we have to pay attention to that.
That said, part of what is challenging about the future of cooling,
if we're going to wean ourselves off of the sole reliance on technology, is that we have to look at things ecologically.
We have to understand that part of the problem is also and how we're looking at the safety of our cities,
that we're thinking about safety in terms of individual responsibility and not in terms of collective responsibility.
And I think that that's wrapped up in a lot of this as well,
and is not just a definition of comfort, but also a definition of what we think is a safe city.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I agree with you. I can bring some example on this link between cooling and safety and criminality and is about
how people prefer to use air conditioning in their cars even when there is no need for it.
And instead of, you know, using natural ventilation because of their fear that they might get assaulted.
And there are a lot of cases of, you know,
young criminals who would they're quite armed and they they take advantage of the cars will stop at the traffic light just to assault them.
And if they see the windows of the car down, they will, of course, have an easier target.
So people really don't like having their windows down and they prefer to have air conditioning.
And this is just one of the many examples of the link between criminality and cooling.
But also I wanted to reflect on what you were saying before, that the responsibility of safety is down to the individual instead of the community,
instead of the public sort of being a public responsibility.
And I remember what I recollect one of the passage in your book in which there was an initial
denial of the ozone layer depletion and when it was evident Reagan was was promoting.
RAEBURN If I if I remember well, just as a symbol to say that it's now your responsibility to deal with the ozone depletion,
just way ribbons and put some sunscreen and everything will be fine.
So, again, an environmental issue,
a huge environmental issue is the responsibility from the collectivity and instead is is down to the individual to find solutions for the issue.
So what do you think about that? Yes.
Yeah. The most absurd moment maybe in in recent environmental history is right.
Rather than. Rather than regulate the companies that were creating Freon CFC years.
And this was at the height of the Reagan era.
So it was a kind of that this incident is sort of the crystallisation of what we had come to know as neo liberalisation,
the hyper individualisation of everything, and the idea that the individual is responsible for their own well-being.
And this is a kind of ultimate expression of freedom. You're free to do whatever you want, but you're also free to starve and burn alive.
And and so during the Reagan years, the they really refused to and to act on and on pushing for regulation to phase out CFC use.
And there was a ridiculous suggestion it didn't actually become policy,
but there was a suggestion that if people just bought sunscreen and sunglasses and then wore hats,
then and they were out in the sun too often, then it wouldn't be a problem.
And of course, that's not true because it was a gross misunderstanding of the problem,
because not only is that obviously absurd, but increased ozone can make entire ecosystems and food chains collapse.
So, you know, not even thinking about what happens to our skin, we it would basically kill most plant life.
So I would say that's a problem. And yeah,
this this hyper individualisation during the the ozone crisis became increasingly it
exposed the ways that we are not equipped to think about addressing environmental crisis.
And I think we and I mean really the Western world, but especially I think the United States in the Reagan years and in Britain in the Thatcher years,
you know, this idea, there is no alternative, you know, to capitalism.
Every person is responsible for their own well-being and their own success.
And this myth that somebody's success does not depend on a grand network of people that actually helps them to get out there.
This is basic ecosystems thinking. And it also showed the limits of, you know, consumer activism,
which don't really do much if the company is still allowed to produce the harmful effect.
Yeah. I seem to recollect that just about the responsibility that you were talking about.
There is a company that you mentioned in your book that was not taking responsibility for the damages that they were doing,
especially in the manufacturing of CFC. Do you remember which one by chance?
This is something recently. There I was. I am from Memphis.
My parents still live there. And I was going home for the holidays to visit my parents.
And they live in a suburb, east suburb of Memphis. And before I went, I was found this map of Superfund sites in the United States.
So sites that where there's major federal investment to clean up environmental spills.
And I saw that there was a Superfund site like half a mile from my parents house.
And I thought, what is that? And I looked at it and it's a carrier plant, carrier air conditioning plant.
And I found out that they had asked the county health board whether they could dump some of
the chemical runoff into the groundwater and dump it might be a slight mischaracterisation,
but store it someplace where it would leak into the groundwater.
Something about Memphis is that they have pristine drinking water and due to the offers that the city sits above.
So as polar as the city gets,
the only thing that everyone can agree on is that everybody loves the drinking water and it's some of the best drinking water in the country.
It's totally clean. It takes very minimal treatment, and it's a kind of gem of the city.
And there were all these studies that said that this was going to leak into and taint the drinking water.
And so, luckily, that the health board said, absolutely, no, you cannot do this.
And that's that's total madness. Why would you do that?
And this, you know, thinking that and a real inability to understand the interdependence of of all things.
And, you know, I think a great example of that, the focus on the consumer is, is single use plastic and recycling.
You know, this idea of recycling as as somebody's responsibility to recycle things.
And if you don't recycle, you're a monster. You know, it's such a scam.
You know, it's not against recycling, but it's not my responsibility and it's not your responsibility that is corporate infrastructure
that the corporation has chosen not to deal with and to punt the responsibility to the consumer.
And that is a corporate responsibility that is shirked. And we see that all the time.
And I think that single use plastic is actually and of course, plastic is oil.
So it's it's oil that the corporation has has shrugged off responsibility for and just kicked it to a person who keeps the cost to the consumer.
Yeah. We seem to be living a period where the responsibility is always down to the individual.
As we were mentioning before, although not all d'informations are in our hands.
So for example, we are often blamed for either travelling too much or, I don't know, using a lot of like fast fashion, for example.
But not all the information is in, in people's hands.
So I can think of for the case of air conditioners, most people don't know that the refrigerant gases,
especially of the older generations, were harmful to the environment.
And if people knew, perhaps they would have made another choice.
I'm thinking about it.
People are mostly aware of, for example, energy efficiency, but not about the greenhouse warming potential of some of these refrigerants.
So, again, is down to corporate responsibility, as you were saying before,
and also environmental and governmental regulations, because people do not have a Ph.D. in chemistry and they don't know.
Now, everybody know the effects of the products or the services that we are consuming.
So really, it is down to the government and corporations to do something.
I think that they hold most of the responsibility, although they're trying to blame single individuals for environmental issues.
Definitely. Yeah. And I think this brings up a tension that I think about all the time, and it's a question I get all the time,
which is this tension between individual versus structural, you know.
And I do think that, you know, more than consumer activism or, you know, what to buy or what not to buy or what to do or what not to do,
that there is an individual responsibility,
but it's to join a collective or join a sort of an organisation to push the government, to push these corporations to act.
I feel like that is of course, it's not an individual responsibility that's actually collective responsibility, but it's that, you know,
like you said, we can't be expected to be experts in these things that are completely complicated and we can't be expected to know that.
And we also shouldn't feel guilt for not knowing that.
But one thing that you can do is to kind of tap into a wider community that does have those resources that's working to push the government or,
you know, a corporation or something like that to change because those well-organised and movements like that can have very dramatic effects.
I mean, something very different. But I think very much related that we're seeing right now is the farmers revolt.
And India, you know, you have a well-organised working class collective that's pushing a pretty violent government to change.
And and we've seen a lot of that organising during the Reagan years, not necessarily around environment,
but around a lot of other things that had a really fantastic effect on the
government and even the the the sort of Ray-Ban plan that the sunscreen and Ray-Ban
and was ridiculed so hard by the media and by environmental activists and parodied
so hard that it had the opposite effect of what the administration had hoped,
which was that it actually moved them to because they were so embarrassed by this.
It was such a scandal that it moved them to actually accept more stringent and robust regulations.
So maybe I'm naive in saying this, but I do think that there's worse in public humiliation in public and holding people accountable
publicly and when it's deserved from people who are in power and not from people and consumers,
you know, citizens. And even though it's becoming increasingly concerning whether people in power really care about their public image,
which is certainly in question, but I still think that that does have an effect.
It's kind of sort of public and public shaming of figures who should be using their responsibility or using their power for responsible ends.
Yeah, I agree absolutely. With this technique of public shaming, especially of the public figures,
although I'm a little bit disenchanted recently because we've seen important public figures being sexists and misogynists being transphobes.
So nothing surprises us anymore because we have the ability to forget too soon.
I think especially in recent times. And so, yeah,
ultimately I think that is down to corporate responsibility and governmental actions to really take responsibility
for all the environmental pollution and all the environmental damages that corporations actually do.
I just wanted to go back to the issue of freedom, although has been banned from commercial uses long time ago.
In your book, we we find evidence that is still traded and is still available in the black market.
Do we have a sense of how much freon is still out there and how difficult it is to phase out?
This is one of the strangest things about Sam's story.
I want to be clear that, you know, CFC's are not one of the major global warming gases,
but at that, the meat compared to methane and carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides.
But given that we have.
Overspent our carbon budget, if you want to put it in those terms.
And every little bit counts and molecules from molecules, CFCs in agencies are highly potent greenhouse gases.
So we can't really afford anything at this point.
And what is super strange is that for a chemical that has not been manufactured in the United States since 1997
and they're sin in his time several years that the screaming energy Start-Up never really saw the end of.
The Freon supply. So I think a lot of.
There are smuggling smuggling operations in the 1980s and early, 2000s for Freon.
In fact, I was just watching The Sopranos and the TV show, and there's a brief mention of the Freon smuggling ring.
And this is maybe 2001.
So for the writers of that show, it was still present in New Jersey mafia organisation, too, to make mention in in an episode of The Sopranos.
So that's one of the reasons why I think that one of the things that makes that what you just said
makes me think of is that the United States was with the Montreal Protocol and the federal regulation,
but in the United States that followed that wildly successful international agreement.
And they were pretty good about shutting down production of cities despite the corporate resistance.
And it was highly successful, one of the few sort of like environmental success stories in terms of shutting down a
chemical and what they were not successful about was considering the cleanup of that.
And to my knowledge, there's no they made it illegal to just throw Freon away.
But in terms of going around like Sam and actually destroying the chemical ecologically, responsibly, there's no programme for that.
And so I think what that points to is,
is a warning story about what to do with chemicals and fossil fuels that have already been dredged and that exist there,
but that we can't afford to burn or emit.
It's very difficult because how do you find this stuff? How do you regulate it?
And but I think that somebody that we need to think about that,
but think about how to actually destroy this stuff and make sure that it's not just freely used.
It's quite remarkable. There's still a market for freon, although is is being phased out.
Some eventually tell you who are the main buyers of freon.
A lot of it's small, individual people. So like car mechanics, people who retrofit cars and things like that.
And sometimes hoarding quite a quite a bit of it is still a little bit of a mystery to me.
There's also this assumption, which I think is maybe true, which is that CFCs are a bit more efficient and cooling.
Given their hailing as being hailed as a scientific miracle for so many years.
That's probably true.
In terms of like energy efficiency and ability to cool and sort of chemical properties and CFC is is remarkably efficient at cooling.
And so a lot of people who want to make fact technicians and things like that just kind of held on to it partly out of the Stoljar,
but partly out of this desire not to change over. And so but it's so curious because there's not really a market in that way for Freon, except now,
of course, there is a market to destroy it for carbon credits and for California's cap and trade system.
And you know, cap and trade has been criticised on the left, rightly so, for an inefficient system that doesn't actually ratchet down emissions.
One thing that and I totally agree with that one thing that I thought was and is interesting, though,
is that for a material that's no longer produced, it's very finite and it is very specific in this case,
CFC 12,
that the California cap and trade system has actually worked to destroy the material ecologically for carbon dioxide and methane and things like that.
No, but and but probably the California cap and trade system has had a positive effect on on destroying this chemical.
Fascinating to learn about this. So what are the next lessons for the future of cooling?
And I mean, I hope this doesn't sound like too rosy or too too cheesy, but I mean, the the lesson that always comes up for me is interconnectivity.
And and this goes back to what we're talking about with corporations, too, is that I actually think that corporations.
Acknowledge this in a way they need the people from below.
They just also need that hierarchy. They need to hold on to the power and also try to control the citizens who are who are purchasing their products.
I think the global leaders also know that and everyone is connected because global leader does not have power without controlling people.
Although global leaders need people, that is how they are granted power.
Otherwise they would just go to an island by themselves and live, you know, wouldn't want people.
The problem there is the hierarchy of power. Right.
And so I think that's something that is important for those who are not global leaders, not CEOs of corporations.
And to keep in mind is that we are all interconnected.
And it is also so important for us to to remember that to break out of this ideological and cultural landscape of the individual.
And also, you know, thinking about coming from cop, a cop was a surreal place because in so many.
In so many areas of the conference, it was as if history did not exist.
The focus was on now and in the future.
And yeah, it's really important that we act now. Obviously, I agree with that.
But it was as if history were banished.
There was no there there were maybe kind of lip service references to colonialism and things like that.
But a lot of the industrialised world was not interested in a deep analysis of the history of colonialism,
because to do that is to also assign responsibility.
And I think one of the that's one of the things that I was hoping to do with this book is to really just try to look at the historical unfolding
of this and to try to reinsert the historical narrative into air conditioning that it's not something that we've always wanted in the same way,
but is actually something that was very painstakingly constructed over time.
And I think that that that's the kind of lesson that that I would like people to take from this book is that is the is the importance of history,
because it shows us that things weren't always this way. And so they don't have to continue being this way in the future.
They can actually change. Thanks a lot, Eric, for being with us.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for so, so many lessons that we learnt today about Crown,
about this journey, the history of AC, about the cultural construction of B.C.,
about how it changed the way that we behave and the way that we deal with comfort
and we can cope with heat and also about future lessons for future leaders.
Thank you so much and I see you next time. Thank you so much.