102F in downtown SF?

Climate control, climate disorder, and our escalating demands for comfort

I was in downtown San Francisco last Saturday. It was 102F, something my friends did not anticipate when they planned a rooftop wedding in October.¹

Afterwards, I spent the two days back home in Saratoga with my aunt, who raised me. The weather was still in the 100s. Her house, like half of houses in the Bay Area, has no air conditioning.

Here’s a text conversation with my friend Will at the time:

Will: How’s your trip been?

Douglas: Good! Taking my aunt to the doctor’s in half an hour. It’s stupidly hot here. And no AC.

Will: No AC?! How is your aunt handling the heat?

Douglas: “Stoically. Like a woman whose parents fled the Communists. Like a person who lived in Hong Kong before the invention of air conditioning.

Discomfort is relative.

Addicted to comfort

We spend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money trying to be comfortable. Paradoxically, the more comfort we attain, the less we are able to tolerate. According to the book, The Comfort Crisis, Ukrainians living in the war zones were asked “is it safe to live where you live?” say yes almost at the same rate US residents do when asked the same question about their own cities. In the same book, Mark Seery, psychology professor at University of Buffalo says, compared to people who grow up in relative comfort:

“[P]eople who’d faced some adversity reported better psychological well-being over the several years of the study. They had higher life satisfaction, and fewer psychological and physical symptoms. They were less likely to use prescription painkillers. They used healthcare services less. They were less likely to report their employment status as disabled.”

In other words, we hedonically adapt. We live a life of greater absolute ease, safety, and comfort, but we don’t subjectively perceive that we do. We always find some bullshit to be upset about.² As any Buddhist teacher will tell you, there’s no escape the wheel of samsara, not even with air conditioning.³ In the book How We Live Is How We Die, Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron says:

“We spend our time trying to be with people we like and avoiding people we don’t like; trying to be in comfortable, pleasant situations and avoiding uncomfortable, unpleasant ones; trying to hold on to whatever pleasure we have and trying to keep all pain at bay. The thought that keeps running through our mind is “If I could just have [fill in the blank], then I would be happy.” The main klesha we experience is craving. The primary suffering in this realm is that we can’t accept the alternation of pleasure and pain. Instead, we tend to be obsessed with trying to achieve or maintain comfort.”

Our obsession with comfort doesn’t make us anymore more comfortable.

Climate control

The escalating trap of comfort, I fall into it too. When Portland gets dark, cold, and wet, I leave for warmer climes. In the summer I use air conditioning.⁴

It makes life so much easier to control my climate. You probably think so too. But “easier” means spending more time inside, which assuredly reinforces our unhealthy relationship to computers, phones and TVs. That’s why I’ve found it so good to have a commitment to move around outside 2.5 hours a day every day. I adapt to climate instead of asking the climate to adapt to me. Having a dog really helps. And over time, I’ve learned to enjoy it; Wu Wei always did:

Wu Wei sez hi

Because of climate change, we’re demanding more and more climate control:

• As I mentioned before half of houses in the Bay Area have air conditioning, but even ten years ago, only 35% of Bay Area houses had AC.

• In Portland, 78% of homes had air conditioning in 2019, but in 2011, only 41% of homes had air conditioning.

Strangely, climate control is a practical form of climate denial. Weather is something we only want to experience on the way from our climate-controlled house to our climate-controlled car to our climate-controlled consumption or production (i.e. capitalism). We increasingly spend more time “comfortable,” and away from climate.

It’s terrible that the more we live in climate control, the more intolerant we are of weather. But worse, it’s the classic tragedy of the commons: the more we individually live in climate control, the more out of control the actual climate becomes. Hurricane Helene just ripped through Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. Two weeks later, Hurricane Milton cut a swath through Florida. Is it a coincidence that hurricanes have come with increasing ferocity and frequency at the same time San Francisco experienced 100F+ in October? Or is climate disorder simply a manifestation that those of us who have been “successful” in life ask for things that harm everyone? The things we think we want all burn increasing amounts of carbon:

• Bigger homes: We demand more space. In 2022, only 8 percent of newly built homes were 1,400 square feet or less, compared with nearly 70 percent in 1940. At the same time, because households are getting smaller, fewer people live in them. with the increased square footage, we also have to burn more energy per square foot to control the climate in those spaces.⁵ And most people I know think their homes are too small.

• More things to fill those homes: We buy three times more furniture than we did in 2000. We use our garages to store stuff we can’t fit in our homes. Yet we do not feel more as satisfied with our homes, or our lives.

• Annual vacations to places our grandparents could only dream of. Total air miles flown in the world was 17.4 billion passenger miles in 1950 and about 285 billion in 1970. Americans passengers alone flew 760 billion miles in 2019. Yet it’s a rare person who I meet who wants to travel less next year.

The funny thing about the hedonic treadmill is that you can’t see how hard you’re running. We have so much more and travel so much more than anyone ever before, but we don’t compare ourselves to others in the past, but others around us in the present. So we all work harder to get more and do more, but never feel like it’s enough. So we keep producing more carbon to shovel more shit.

We see everyone else doing it, so we think we have to do it too. We think it’s “the way that it is.”⁶

We don’t interrogate our selfishness because it is valued by our culture. But what we think of as “success” is just taking more of a declining commons.

Personal climate control, a symptom (and cause) of our collective climate mismanagement.

102F in San Francisco in October.

Is this really fine?

“Comforts, once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common feeling with the rest of humanity.” — Sebastian Junger, The Comfort Crisis.

1. I would have taken pictures, but my phone overheated and shut down.

2. Here’s Pete Adeney, aka Mister Money Mustache, with his indelible summary of The Comfort Crisis .

Have you ever wondered why the type of bored, rich suburbanites who populate the board of your local Homeowner Association and whine about unacceptably tall weeds or unauthorized skateboarding on Nextdoor are so insufferable?

Why can’t they do something better with their time?

It turns out that there’s a scientific explanation for these unfortunate people, along with most of our other problems:

The tendency of humans to always scan our environment for problems, regardless of how safe and perfect that environment is.

The book cited a study in which researchers told people to look for danger, in an environment which gradually became safer and safer:

“When they ran out of stuff to find they would start looking for a wider range of stuff, even if this was not conscious or intentional, because their job was to look for threats.” 

“With that in mind, Levari recently conducted a series of studies to find out if the human brain searches for problems even when problems become infrequent or don’t exist.“

“As we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.“

In other words, even when our lives are virtually problem free, instead of appreciating our good fortune we just start making up shit that we can complain about instead…. 

3. The Buddha did not experience AC ha! There’s a larger point here; no one before 1900 experienced AC.

4. In college, living in a co-op of radical environmentalists, we kept the thermostat in winter in the 40s, just enough not to freeze the pipes. In summer, driving a Chrysler k-car, I would actually strip down to my underwear, roll down the windows, and drive in the 100F Sacramento Valley heat. No longer.

5. Cubic volume math.

6. Lynne Twist’s Three Toxic Myths: 1. There's not enough (and I am not enough). 2. More is better. 3. That's the way it is.