Afraid of Rising Global Temperatures? Ditch Your Air Conditioner, Suggests New York Times Essay.

Depriving yourself of a modern luxury like air conditioning makes even less sense than banning plastic straws.

By Joe Lancaster of Reason. Excerpt:

"While 90 percent of American households have an air conditioner, the overwhelming majority of its direct greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation and electricity production. Air conditioning accounts for around 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Simply put, it matters much less how often and at what temperature we run the thermostat than how we create the vast majority of our electricity in the first place.

To that end, switching to nuclear energy would be a tremendous advantage. "Every year, nuclear-generated electricity saves our atmosphere from more than 440 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions that would otherwise come from fossil fuels," according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. "That's the same as taking nearly 100 million passenger vehicles off the road." The International Atomic Energy Agency claims that "the use of nuclear power has reduced carbon dioxide emissions by more than 60 gigatonnes over the past 50 years, which is almost two years' worth of global energy-related emissions."

In that sense, spraying yourself with water instead of running the air conditioner makes as much sense as banning plastic straws. Straw bans were once touted as a meaningful step toward eradicating plastic pollution, even getting companies like Starbucks to shift away from plastic straws.

But "despite the concerted efforts by corporations, the plastic straws ban has only made a minor difference in plastic waste production," wrote Owen Mulhern at Earth.org. "National Geographic reveals that where 8 million tonnes of plastics flow into the ocean every year, plastic straws merely comprise 0.025% of the total. The finding indicates that banning plastic straws could not make a significant improvement to the environment.""