With energy at the root of the biggest crises we face, air conditioning must be dealt with as a subject of debate, not as an assumption. To wrestle with the question of air-conditioning is to confront the staggering task we face in keeping the world habitable for humans.
—from LOSING OUR COOL

In Losing Our Cool, scientist and environmental journalist Stan Cox shows that indoor climate control is colliding with an out-of-control outdoor climate. In America, energy consumed by home air-conditioning and the resulting greenhouse emissions have doubled in just over a decade; energy used to cool retail stores has risen by two thirds. And six out of every seven gallons of diesel fuel U.S. forces haul into Iraq and Afghanistan are used to run air-conditioning.

Reporting from some of the world’s hot zones—from Arizona and Florida to India—Cox documents the surprising ways in which air-conditioning changes human experience: giving a boost to the global warming that it is designed to help us endure, providing a potent commercial stimulant, making possible an impossible commuter economy, and altering migration patterns. Though it saves lives in heat waves, it may also be altering our bodies’ sensitivity to heat; our rates of infection, allergy, asthma, and obesity; and even our sex drive.

Air-conditioning has helped change the political hue of the United States. It has even served as an instrument of torture. Cox argues that by reintroducing traditional cooling methods as well as putting newer technologies into practice—and by moving past industrial definitions of comfort—we can make ourselves comfortable and keep the planet comfortable, too.


Before joining the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, as senior scientist in 2000, Stan Cox worked as a U.S. Department of Agriculture geneticist for thirteen years. His environmental writing has been widely published. He is the author of Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine.

Pub Date: Spring 2010
Format: hardcover
Trim: 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 272 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59558-489-2