Fighting straw men

Doug Mataconis has a piece up defending air-conditioning:

It’s hard to tell if Cox and others like him hate air-conditioning because of it’s impact on the environment, because it caused people to move south, or because it allegedly led to the resurgence of the Republican Party as a Southern-SouthWestern party. Whatever the reason, it hardly qualifies as serious scholarship. If Cox wants to spend the next week without air-conditioning, that’s is choice. I, on the other hand, will be keeping him at a tolerable temperature completely guilt-free.

I don't know about Cox, but most environmentalists hate air-conditioning because, as Cox's article states, "Americans now use as much electricity to power our A.C. as the entire continent of Africa uses for, well, everything." Air-conditioning is a major factor in power consumption, and its prevalence makes tackling global warming that much harder.

Andrew Sullivan, in one of his unthinking "lefty environmentalists like it, so I've gotta hate it" moments, adds:

The worst thing about the Cape is that they pride themselves on not needing much air-conditioning. And then this current heat wave happens, and you end up hotter out here than in the oven that is Washington DC. I regard air-conditioning as one of the greatest contributions to human well-being in the last century.

The worst thing about the Cape is that the residents enjoy not having to spend money on air-conditioning? And "one of the greatest contributions to human well-being in the last century"? Really? Off the top of my head, items that I think are greater contributors to human well-being: vaccines (measles, mumps, smallpox, polio), organ transplants, automobiles, airplanes, the Internet, computers (even without the Internet), cellular phones, plastics, the liberalization of trade, the peaceful fall of the Soviet Union, the peaceful rise of China... I could go on. Unfortunately, Mr. Sullivan frequently feels the need to distance himself from the DFH's, and so air-conditioning is "one of the greatest contributions to human well-being in the last century".