I get what you’re saying but heaters are way worse than air conditioners in terms of emissions. People in New England getting diesel fuel — branded as “heating oil” — deliveries in winter isn’t questioned in the same way as Phoenix residents running their (electric) A/C is.
The American Southwest has been continuously inhabited for millennia. I don’t live there but I know I get lectured about where I live — New Orleans — by smug fools whose framework for understanding the world seems to come entirely from the Grasshopper and the Ant fable where preparing for winter makes you morally superior to everyone else.
There’s definitely some truth to the asymetric way we talk about heating dominated vs cooling dominated climates. I don’t hear people criticize folks for living in Alaska or the upper Midwest or NE despite their massive heating costs, and this type of living isn’t inherently any more noble than AC use (although synthetic refrigerants are all awful, but we use them for heat pumps too). Lack of water is a bigger issue arguably, cold is seen as more survivable than extreme heat, but carbon is carbon. The American SW used to have more water though, and their civilizations lived quite differently than modern Phoenicians.
Example numbers - I live in Colorado, have a high end cold climate heat pump, and use 10x the energy seasonally to heat my home vs cool my home. I also make excess solar power even when cooling in the summer, but winter is another story. I used 10 kWh yesterday when it was 100F (an amount an EV owner might casually use every single day), almost all covered entirely by my solar panels (except dusk until about 10pm when it shut off), while the coldest day last winter was -15F and I used almost 80 kWh that day, almost zero of it from solar because snow on the roof. We’re not going to get everyone to move at the macro level, so micro level movements, resiliency, and adapting to the environment rather than fighting it make the most sense.
The grasshopper and ant parable is about preparation and not the virtue of winter. It’s equally applicable to heat waves, storm surges, flooding, water, etc.
I get what you’re saying but heaters are way worse than air conditioners in terms of emissions. People in New England getting diesel fuel — branded as “heating oil” — deliveries in winter isn’t questioned in the same way as Phoenix residents running their (electric) A/C is.
The American Southwest has been continuously inhabited for millennia. I don’t live there but I know I get lectured about where I live — New Orleans — by smug fools whose framework for understanding the world seems to come entirely from the Grasshopper and the Ant fable where preparing for winter makes you morally superior to everyone else.
There’s definitely some truth to the asymetric way we talk about heating dominated vs cooling dominated climates. I don’t hear people criticize folks for living in Alaska or the upper Midwest or NE despite their massive heating costs, and this type of living isn’t inherently any more noble than AC use (although synthetic refrigerants are all awful, but we use them for heat pumps too). Lack of water is a bigger issue arguably, cold is seen as more survivable than extreme heat, but carbon is carbon. The American SW used to have more water though, and their civilizations lived quite differently than modern Phoenicians.
Example numbers - I live in Colorado, have a high end cold climate heat pump, and use 10x the energy seasonally to heat my home vs cool my home. I also make excess solar power even when cooling in the summer, but winter is another story. I used 10 kWh yesterday when it was 100F (an amount an EV owner might casually use every single day), almost all covered entirely by my solar panels (except dusk until about 10pm when it shut off), while the coldest day last winter was -15F and I used almost 80 kWh that day, almost zero of it from solar because snow on the roof. We’re not going to get everyone to move at the macro level, so micro level movements, resiliency, and adapting to the environment rather than fighting it make the most sense.
The grasshopper and ant parable is about preparation and not the virtue of winter. It’s equally applicable to heat waves, storm surges, flooding, water, etc.