My boyfriend’s mother, a Boston chemist whose early career involved visiting oil refineries across the globe, has a saying about Texas: “There’s no place colder than Houston in the summer.” Of course, it’s not the outside temperatures she’s referring to, which regularly top 100 degrees in the summertime, but the aggressively air-conditioned indoor climate. As she is wont to note, the cold is intended for the comfort of those who wear suits—the sleeveless among us be damned.

I was reminded of her adage in 2022, when I attended a Houston carbon capture expo amid a mid-June heat wave. Enviro-capitalists milled around a huge convention center that showcased the latest in technology that removes CO2 from the atmosphere or prevents it from being released, and promised to save humanity from climate disaster. All the while, frigid air issued from the vents above us. I found myself frequently stepping outside to warm up, basking in the sun until the heat once again became oppressive before turning back inside to suffer the cold. There was an obvious irony here: cooling accounts for around 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. (To put that number into perspective, the entire aviation industry accounts for 2.5 percent of emissions.) Of course, without A/C, the conference would have been miserable, though perhaps the urgency of the matter would be more acutely felt. 

Houston ranks first in the country in air conditioning usage with more than 99 percent of households owning an A/C. Dallas comes in fourth place—nearly 98.5 percent of households use it. Globally, the United States and Japan are the most artificially cooled countries with more than 90 percent of households owning air conditioners, while in India and Africa, only 5 percent do. And it’s not just developing countries that consume less energy for cooling than we do. Anyone who’s ventured across the Atlantic knows that Europeans have an entirely different approach when it comes to air-conditioning: in the summertime, you’re supposed to sweat, not shiver. Of course, this cultural inclination has partly to do with the fact that countries in Europe have historically been cooler than the American South. That’s also changing: as temperatures rise across the continent, so has the demand for air-conditioners.  

Here in Texas, enduring the heat is a rite of passage inscribed into the state identity; the first page of Larry McMurtry’s epic Lonesome Dove depicts Augustus McCrae in search of shade: “Evening took a long time getting to Lonesome Dove, but when it came it was a comfort,” McMurtry writes. Though it’s fair to say the temperatures have risen in the nearly forty years since the book published, Texans seem to have lost some of our grit where the heat is concerned, relying instead on the flick of the switch, the turn of the knob, the roar of the compressor. There are, of course, the exceptions: those who work outdoors; those who don’t have the luxury of owning an air-conditioner. 

I didn’t realize how much modern life in Texas depended on A/C, and how much I might also come to rely on it, until I relocated to Austin about a year and a half ago. The apartment complex I moved into was modern and replete with amenities including a gym and pool. The lobby was consistently cooled to 70 degrees in the summer months, a welcome respite from the swamp-like heat outside. In all my adult life, I’d never lived somewhere so nice before. And, for the first time in my life, I had the ability to control my living space by single degrees via a programmable thermostat. 

Though we technically had central air in my childhood home in Queens, New York, my German father was a stickler about our energy consumption, particularly since he was footing the bill, a fact of which he reminded us frequently. His tyranny precluded my mom, brother, and me from even considering tampering with the thermostat. Later, when I moved to the far West Texas border town of Presidio, where temps could regularly reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit, I was only ever equipped with window units and swamp coolers. And yet, somehow I survived into my thirties.    

My first summer in Austin was both a test of will and freedom. Enduring eleven days of 105-plus weather, I found myself in a state of hibernation, closing my shades well before dusk to block out the glaring light and turning down the thermostat to a comfortable cool. During the day, I would get by at 74 degrees Fahrenheit and by nighttime I’d turn it down to 70. 

Several months ago, as the heat started up again, I began wearing a ring on my finger that tracks my sleep and activity, breaking down my physical existence into readable graphs and analytics. On one occasion, the app that accompanies the fitness tracker, reminded me that the optimal temperature for sleep is 65 degrees Fahrenheit. “In this economy?” I thought. I did a little research, which only affirmed what the app had told me. Doctors recommend a range between 60 and 67 degrees for ideal sleep, while temperatures above 70 degrees Fahrenheit are associated with greater levels of insomnia. Though I couldn’t justify bringing the thermostat that low, I tried it at 69 degrees Fahrenheit, then 68, convinced I could feel the difference in degrees (Dad, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry.) 

A couple of weeks ago, my boyfriend and I journeyed out to West Texas for a summer stint. The house where we are staying in Marfa, something like a thousand square feet and awash with desert light—beautiful but hot—has only two underpowered window units to cool it. When we first walked inside, a wall of heat stopped us in our tracks. I made a beeline for the A/C, but the window unit in the living room seemed to only offer a whisper of relief. The first night, as we lay naked and very much awake, I came to realize that the luxury I’d been afforded in my apartment had effectively become a drawback. Without my ability to control the thermostat to 68 degrees, I couldn’t sleep. 

Grappling with my insomnia, I pondered the ways in which my overreliance on technology, and our cultural obsession with optimization—over our spaces, our bodies, even our sleep—have rendered me weak. I had survived West Texas before, and with only one window unit, so why was the heat suddenly so burdensome? By growing accustomed to certain comforts, I’d become vulnerable without them. There seems to be a growing tension between our interior life and the outside world: indoors, we increasingly make our environments as convenient and comfortable as possible while outside our climate-controlled spaces, the natural world becomes more and more chaotic.

As our climate gets hotter, our dependency on cooling has also caused a negative feedback loop. The more energy we consume to cool down, the more emissions we create, contributing further to the problem that got us here in the first place. Meanwhile, there’s a real gap in those regions of the world that may need to rely on cooling for survival. Currently, only 8 percent of folks living in the hottest parts of the world have A/C in their homes. A Harvard study projected that by 2050, at least 70 percent of the population in certain countries will require air conditioning if the rate of emissions continues to increase. 

Remote and without access to many of the modern luxuries city-dwellers have grown accustomed to—overnight shipping, for example, or easy access to consistently fresh produce—far West Texas has a way of testing one’s mettle, and of winnowing out those with more delicate constitutions. But the place also serves a reminder that we are endlessly adaptable. Over the past few days, I’ve discovered new ways to stay cool. Each night before bed, I take a cold shower—more energy efficient and yet equally effective as A/C. Who needs to wear a blanket in the summertime? As for the peak heat of the day, I’m trying to embrace a more hard-bitten, old-school Texan approach, becoming more comfortable in my discomfort, waiting patiently for evening to arrive, or else, as McCrae did, seeking solace in the shade.