By: Jim Taylor

Heat separates the privileged from the poor


It’s scorching hot, and forecast to get hotter. I’m sitting in the shade, reading today’s newspaper.

• Police and organizers worry about rowdyism and drunkenness at Kelowna’s recent Wakefest.
• Someone deliberately threw four kittens out the window of his van, one by one, as he drove along.
• The jury found Conrad Black guilty on four counts including corporate fraud.
• China executed – yes, put to death – an official for allowing counterfeit medicines into the market.
• In Pakistan, the army stormed a hardliners’ mosque after a weeklong siege, killing an extremist cleric and an unknown number of supporters. The army requested 400 white funeral shrouds.
• The Pope declared all other churches defective.
• First Nations groups across Canada held a national “Day of Action”—which really meant a day of inaction, as they blockaded road and rail traffic.

        And you know something? I don’t care much.
bsp; I suspect the same is happening all across Canada. If politicians, executives, and social activists didn’t have air-conditioned rooms to meet in, the country would wilt into a puddle of apathy.

        When we lived in Toronto, my father came to visit us one July. We didn’t have air conditioning. Dad spent each day sitting in the shade of the birch tree in the back yard, occasionally stirring just enough to sip some iced tea or lemonade.

Southern Ontario doesn’t get much hotter than the Okanagan Valley, but its humidity makes even a sauna feel habitable.

        And Toronto doesn’t begin to compare to the Middle East or equatorial Africa. I cannot imagine how combatants can wage war in the Gaza Strip, in Iraq, or in Afghanistan during summer.



Worst for the poor, anywhere

Temperature extremes exacerbate the distinction between privileged and poor. Even if they don’t have air conditioning, the comfortably well-off in the tropics have thick stone walls, high ceilings, and airy verandas.

        The poor lack any such amenities. In Namibia, the poor broil in their own bake ovens—acres and acres of tin boxes made of corrugated iron. In Brazil, they huddle in mid-brick favelas; in India, they shrivel under improvised tents of black plastic set up on scorching concrete sidewalks.

        Asian potentates used to have huge fans slung overhead, with servants pulling on ropes to flap the fans and create a breeze.

        Of course, it takes energy to move the fans. Preferably, someone else’s energy.

        You cannot actually cool yourself by fanning yourself. That’s a fact of physics. The energy you use to wave a fan generates more internal heat than you lose by creating a breeze on your face.

        Heat always flows from the hotter object to the cooler. In temperate climates, we expect the air to be cooler than we are. Thus when we get hot from exertion, we can radiate heat into our environment. But when the atmosphere is hotter than our bodies, heat flows from the environment to the person.



Keeping cool

Then we have to find alternate means of cooling down.

        Indian palaces used elaborate fountains to reduce air temperature. If I remember Physics 101 correctly, one calorie of heat will raise the temperature of a gram of water one degree Celsius. But to convert that same gram of liquid into water vapour requires 540 calories. So every drop of water evaporating from a fountain sucked heat out of the surrounding air.

        In Mexico, the afternoon siesta is a time-honoured custom. In Greece and much of the Mediterranean, many businesses close at noon and don’t re-open until five.

        In our energy intensive world, we depend on air conditioning instead.

        When Las Vegas reached 116 degrees (47 Celsius) recently, transformers overheated and caused electrical pole fires because of all the people switching on their air conditioners. The same day, Baker, California, reached 125 degrees (52 Celsius).

        But air conditioning, like the potentate’s fan, requires an external source of energy. Instead of slaves or servants, we use electricity, typically generated at a safe distance by burning coal or oil in power plants.

        Economist Milton Friedman popularized the saying, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” There’s no such thing as free cooling, either.



Social inequities

Here in Canada, energy consumption peaks in the winter, as we struggle to keep our homes warm. In the southern U.S., it peaks in summer, to keep homes and offices comfortably cool.

        Before air conditioning, the only way to stay comfortable in the deep south was to sit on an airy veranda sipping a mint julep.

        The servants who brought the mint julep, of course, and the slaves who worked in the cotton fields so that the owner could afford a mint julep, didn’t enjoy that luxury.

        But then, they weren’t really considered human. If they were, owners might have to give up their verandas and mint juleps.

        It’s not surprising that the push to abolish slavery came from the more temperate areas of the world. In a heat wave, even slave owners with a social conscience would find it hard to muster the energy to combat a pervasive injustice.

        Nor is it surprising that the songs and dreams of slaves focused on paradise in the sweet bye-and-bye. In my comfortable existence, I may feel queasy about theology that treats this life as a temporary inconvenience, one that largely ignores the imperative to create God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven.”

        But I didn’t live their lives. Their theology was what they needed.

        The story of Little Black Sambo – now politically offensive – described a black boy watching while a tiger chased himself around a tree in the hot sun until he melted into a pool of butter.

        The story reverses their usual roles – in real life, the black people melted in the sun, while the tigers watched.

        Those inequities disturb me deeply. But as the thermometer pushes higher, it gets harder to feel concerned about anyone’s survival but my own.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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