More Air-Conditioners Crank Up as Heat Wave Wilts Large Part of U.S.

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By Alan Blinder and Sonia A. Rao, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: San Francisco hit 90 degrees on Friday, the first day of spring. ...As these kind of spikes have become more common, there has been a rush to add air conditioning in the region. More than half of the San Francisco area’s homes now have air-conditioning, a first for the famously cool region.... It is not just the Bay Area: The United States has become a lot more air-conditioned in recent years, both fueling climate change and taming its day-to-day consequences. About 93 percent of occupied American housing units had primary air-conditioning in 2023, according to the most recently published federal data. Eight years earlier, about 89 percent did. ...Compared to other countries...the United States was “oddly obsessed with air-conditioning.” ...one issue is that relatively few American buildings, especially in places historically unaccustomed to intense heat, were designed to embrace alternate cooling methods, such as external shading. But the nation’s air-conditioner-centric culture did not help.... 

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