April 26, 2021
Wilson, who teaches climate-themed writing and environmental justice at Queens College, debuts with a tour de force on the steep costs of living in a world that prioritizes personal comfort. He focuses on the coolant Freon and related chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that have wrought havoc on the ozone layer, arguing that though air conditioning is seen as a necessity, it hasn’t improved people’s quality of life. He points out that low-income people, “especially those of color,” are less likely to have access to air conditioning but are more affected by the environmental consequences of climate change (Black women, he writes, “experience the highest rate of complications during pregnancy due to heat and pollution”). Controlling and destroying refrigerants is the best path forward to mitigate climate change, he writes, and his message is as urgent as it is idealistic: he urges readers “to unravel the political, economic, and cultural structures that produce our desires for narrow, individualized, personal comfort, to shift the narratives that put the responsibility on individual will instead of collective community” in the hopes that they’ll consider the implications of such everyday decisions as switching on an AC unit. Wilson’s impressive take offers climate-minded readers much to consider.
June 1, 2021
An unsettling exploration of the history and cultural influence of air conditioning and refrigerants. In his first book, journalist and educator Wilson shows us how "studying cooling can help us understand global heating," offering an important reminder about the problems associated with refrigerant chemicals. "We've launched nearly ungraspable amounts of refrigerant into the stratosphere without thinking," he writes, "and still, we hardly notice them." Hailed as a miracle when it was introduced to the public in 1930, Freon quickly became the world's leading refrigerant because, unlike its predecessors, it was nontoxic and nonflammable. But chemists discovered that Freon destroys the stratospheric ozone layer. In a move still hailed as the single most successful international agreement, the 1987 Montreal Protocol required nations to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. Refrigerants are now chemically related to Freon but much less harmful to ozone. So what's the problem? It turns out that the entire Freon family consists of potent greenhouse gases--thousands of times more so than the carbon dioxide created from burning fossil fuels. Having absorbed this shocking information early on, readers may expect Wilson to sound the alarm and urge climate activists to pay attention. Although that's an ongoing theme, the author has not written a polemic but rather a philosophical attack on the free market and capitalism, which drive our obsession with personal comfort. According to Wilson, this began in 19th-century America with industrial cooling, invented for factory owners who had no interest in workers but needed to "condition" air to benefit machines and products. After World War II, technical progress and the use of Freon produced home and auto air conditioners. Postwar housing, featuring picture windows, concrete floors, and low ceilings, "required air-conditioning," and public spaces emptied as people sealed themselves inside. Wilson maintains that this love of personal comfort, regardless of community and environmental costs, is a mark of "escalating imperialism, spreading capitalism, the accelerating exploitation of workers, [and] the continuation of racist and classist ideas about the value of certain bodies over others." Wilson occasionally overreaches but nonetheless provides ingenious food for thought.
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June 1, 2021
For most Americans, air conditioning is an essential if unremarkable aspect of day-to-day life. However, as Wilson's genre-defying work of literary nonfiction reveals, with our personal comfort comes a complex web of environmental and socioeconomic costs. Blending history and science, along with a tapestry of literature, philosophy, poetry, and pop culture, Wilson explores the origins of mechanical cooling and how it became a ubiquitous part of American life, as well as a devastating agent of ozone depletion and climate change. Wilson also examines how the development of air conditioning is deeply rooted in racism and white supremacy and how personal cooling and comfort have led to disconnected communities that lack a sense of the greater good. The sheer volume of ideas and narrative strands in this book can be overwhelming at times. But Wilson's magnetic writing is undeniable and often entertaining despite the challenging subject. Readers of this book won't be shamed for using air conditioning. Instead, Wilson reasonably but passionately calls for a new definition of comfort that prioritizes community interdependence and connection.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.