Fighting Global Warming With Air Conditioning
No matter where you reside, if you own an air conditioner in your home than you will find interesting the story that I am about to share with you. And if you do not own an A/C unit, then my story might tick you off. What’s the story? I’ll get to it in just a minute.
First, there is a continued push in our society for “green”. The green thumb, green manufacturing, green recycling, green products, and even green systems are increasing in popularity each day.
As a formally educated environmental engineer (yes, my bachelors degree), I spent a great deal of time investigating “green stuff” years ago before trading environmental brain energy for systems-based thinking. My personal opinion is that green initiatives are healthy in most cases that do not involve politics.
A great example of a political-based agenda is global warming. Believe what you may, but nobody is going to convince me that there is statistically significant variation in the earth’s temperature in the short years that humans have been recording such information to back such a claim. In combining research with monetary flow, I’ve watched individuals become filthy rich in large part due to the global warming scare.
My family and I recently made one of our patented last minute stops into one of the parks at Walt Disney World. This time we slipped into Magic Kingdom only to catch the brand new “Nightastic!” fireworks show. We entered as a light parade was passing by and we were quickly stifled by the multiple rows of people standing along the parade route.
As we always do, we quickly engaged in one of our shortcut paths through the rows of air-conditioned stores. As we walked, I watched as person after person would walk through the wide-open store doors and into a rather frigid inside environment. You could literally see the sigh of relief on people’s faces that are not accustomed to the outside heat.
Yes, I did say wide-open doors. Disney makes a habit of air conditioning all of their stores and opening every door possible. Interesting, huh? This certainly does not align with any such green initiatives. It is no doubt an ingenious way of pulling people off of the street and into stores where pocketbooks can be opened.
In the normal world, nobody leaves windows or doors open when their air conditioner is running. If I were a betting man, I would bet that Disney knows exactly what they are doing and that the Return-On-Investment (ROI) for air conditioning the outside air is high. I just wonder if their ROI is pushed even higher by certain political groups for rewarding Disney in their efforts to fight global warming.
2 comments
Dr. Bradley W. Semp
Dr. Brad helps businesses to Design for Action! Click here to learn more.
I agree with you 100%. Global Warming is used by many when it is convenient and can help their bottom line.
My favorite is “if you would like to save the world please hang your towels on the towel rack so we don’t have to wash them.” I would bet the hotel cares more about saving the cost of laundry than saving the world.
One need only look at the world’s oceans to see the writing on the wall. You can’t remove 100 MILLION sharks per year for 15 years straight (for shark fin soup – thank you Asia!) – yep that’s 1.5 BILLION sharks left to rot at the bottom – and not have an impact. forget carbon problems – it’s the VAST NUMBER OF HUMANS – nearly 7 billion and increasingly resource hungry, richer (thank you free enterprise system!), and everyone wants their share of “the American dream” worldwide. I watched as crew members of the Ady Gil (Whale Wars – Animal Planet) pulled a SIXTY MILE LONG LINE out of the southern ocean, thousands of miles away from the nearest land mass – when humans are going to that extreme to rape the ocean, the food chain is on the brink of collapse. I challenge ANYONE who has a critical thinking neuron left in their body to spend 24 hours at the Woods Hole Institute in La Jolla and still cling to the belief that everything is hunky dory on planet earth.