AFTER COOLING

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.