Should Schools have A/C?

Or do we need hot days to be considered "bad weather" days and just close the schools? 

And do we need to re-think how we do school - and civilization - entirely as we start to feel the effects of climate change?

I was always bothered when the main office, where admin lives, had A/C while the classrooms did not. I'm not sure how frequently that happens, but their early justification, that they all have computers in there that need to stay cool, no longer holds much water as all the kids carry laptops or chromebooks to each class. All classrooms have computers in them that need to stay cool. And people.

As a teacher I used to come in at 6 am to open the windows in my classroom and the classroom across the hall for a good two hours before kids started to come in. Understandably, windows have to stay closed at night for security reasons. Just that tiny effort that afforded me two quiet hours to get my marking down, was enough that kids commented on how cool my room was still in the last period of the day. A former custodian used to open up the receiving doors in the morning to air out the school and turn off half the hallway lights. I mentioned that to the new head custodian, and she was quite certain that didn't ever happen and that it would do nothing to help. She was wrong, but she's in charge.

It's amazing what fresh air can do!

But now that we're in the final act of the show, locking in the 2°C target we hoped to avoid, everything we do could use a good re-thinking to push that final destination off as long as possible. So that's where I'm coming from, my underlying premise to this most unpopular opinion as I say "No" to the online polls about school A/C. I've also been highly influenced by seeing Stephen Lewis speak after he spent five years in Africa working to mitigate the AIDS crisis there: He chastised the audience for having A/C in Canadian homes. What we're going through for a couple weeks each year, sometimes just a couple of days, is a drop in the bucket compared to what some countries endure regularly because of our excessive energy use here.

I've written about A/C in schools before. 

In 2012, on a day that hit 42°, I started with a David Roberts quote: "If we keep doing what we are now doing, we are screwed. This we know now." I added, 

"The danger comes in believing we have to have to have A/C to live, which adds to GHGs in the atmosphere, which increases the temperature, which makes us want A/C more. There are positive feedback loops on the planet that can't be stopped, but this is one that can. If we can manage the weeks of heat every summer without A/C, if we can learn to cope with extreme temperature and stay cool without air conditioners, then we can slow down climate change. . . . It's hard to wrap our heads around this idea of the world not continuing as it always has for us. We plan for the future with the belief that it will look pretty similar to the present. But what if that's not the case?"

That was eleven years ago. It's so clearly not the case that our future will be similar to our present or recent past. Look to the flooding in Greece where they got over 2' of rain in hours or fires in B.C. that burned over 13 million hectares of land for evidence. If it hasn't hit your area yet, it will. Soon.

Then just seven years ago I wrote,

"This was a hot start to the school year. I taught a few classes with sweat dripping off my face as I spoke animatedly and enthusiastically about my courses. It was uncomfortable to be sure. And it was no better for students staring back at me all pink-faced and glistening. It's hard to learn when you're uncomfortable.

 But when I discussed teachers who are advocating for A/C in the classroom (and a Premier who agrees with them), my grade tens were keen enough to pick up on the irony of it all, on the paradox created. Our excessive use of fossil fuels (and factory farms) has increased the global temperature such that we're seeing hotter summers, and we can expect them to increase in intensity in the years following. And this solution of adding A/C to all the schools will make the privileged few more comfortable in the short term, but it will actually exacerbate the problem for the many and around the world. 

It's worse than a band-aid solution. A better analogy might be to rip the crap out of a mosquito bite (which we can also expect more of) to get some immediate relief and then put a band-aid on the bloody mess we created, which still itches but now it hurts too. It's a self-wounding-band-aid solution. . . . We can't keep looking at old solutions that are part of the problem."

As my former students recognized, we're trying to make ourselves more comfortable while we add fuel to the fire, literally, like when we continue to travel by plane and eat high on the food chain and drive everywhere instead of using public transit or cycling or walking. Like with Covid, we could mitigate this problem, but it does take changing our lives a bit and doing without some luxuries and some comforts that we're used to, and apparently that's way too much to ask of people. 

It will never be enough to just let the leaders take care of things. We all have to do our part. Unfortunately that mentality was lost after we won WWII by nuking the shit out of cities. 

As Plato said, more or less, we suck at measuring long term gains against immediate pains.

We really have to think about what is an absolute necessity in our lives, and what isn't. Before adding in something that requires electricity, consider is there any other possible way to get a desired result without using energy, and is this desired result imperative (as it arguably is in hospitals and LTC homes). This goes for crypto and AI, which both take an impressive amount of energy to run:

"Fundamentally speaking, if you do want to save the planet with AI, you have to consider also the environmental footprint. It doesn't make sense to burn a forest and then use AI to track deforestation." 

Are we sure they're necessary to our survival??

AND if schools all get A/C, then they'll never open the windows to help with mitigation of viral infections. They won't be allowed to.

One solution when it's too hot to learn is to close schools and non-essential businesses like happens in a blizzard. We all need to slow the fuck down!! A day lost from school or work isn't the tragedy it's sometimes painted as. We can catch up. If nobody's getting any work done anyway because it's too hot, then the time is better spend under a tree with a good book, a good friend, and/or a good nap.

We definitely need more trees.

How much does it really matter whether or not we have the exactly right number of days in the school year once we start really seeing that there's a limit to the number of years left for our species. We need to focus on what does really matter: keeping agricultural lands safe to keep us all fed, maintaining sanitation systems to keep the cities clean, housing the unhoused, protecting forests and wetlands, generally taking care of the land and one another.