Last week’s scorching temperatures may have solidified our love-hate relationship with Canadian weather.
We lament the cold, long-drawn-out painful grip of winter, enraptured by visions of hot summer days baking on the beach or Snowbird adventures in tropical locales.
But when the summer heat hits with a vengeance, people scurry for air-conditioned environments or linger in the frozen food section.
The efforts to keep cool, though, exacts a toll on aging electricity infrastructure and often overburdens the grid, leaving customers in the dark.
About 250,000 people in Toronto experienced the inconveniences of a heat-wave blackout last Monday, drudging up uncomfortable memories of the power outages that swept through Ontario and parts of the Midwest and Northeast USA in August 2003.
While blackouts cause annoying interruptions for both home and work life, we should count our many blessings. For many, power shortages are a way of life.
Ongoing widespread power shortages in Iraq have led to riots and demonstrations this summer.
A 49-year-old housewife in central Baghdad, interviewed by Khalid Waleed of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, said she “tries to raise her family on only two hours of electricity per day.”
Similar problems play out in countries around the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, power shortages and service interruptions are a part of life.
The World Bank calls inadequate access to power the single largest stumbling block to Africa’s economic development. Vivien Foster, co-editor of the report Africa’s Infrastructure: A Time for Transformation, said that the 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, home to 800 million people, generate about the same amount of power as Spain, which has a population of 45 million.
Power consumption per capita in Africa is about 124 kilowatt-hours per day, “barely enough to power one 100-watt light bulb per person for three hours a day,” says Foster.
The global disparity should make us pause and consider the electricity generation and delivery systems we enjoy.
However, when power failures and blackouts grind our lives to a halt and we experience the almost immediate symptoms of television and Internet withdrawal, we are forced to consider the tenuous state of affairs when the systems that deliver the good life to our doorstep leave us hanging.
The prudent have stashes of emergency supplies, from bottled water and hand-crank flashlights, to gas generators and military-style MRE’s (meals ready to eat). Others have made calculated efforts to get off the grid, adapting wind, solar and geothermal technologies into home designs, weaning themselves from a reliance on fossil fuel energy.
Urban gardening has become somewhat of a trend, but community gardens, suburban chicken coops and balcony spice pots are proof that an appetite exists for some measure of self-sufficiency.
Blackouts are the price to pay when consumption goes beyond generation capacities, but does it have to be that way? Do we really need cold-storage style environments en masse during heat waves?
Stan Cox, author of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World, says that air conditioning is effective — as a life-support system if people are in heat-related danger.
“But it is a different issue from the routine, lavish and rapidly growing use of air conditioning in the other 99 per cent of the situations we find ourselves in,” said Cox in a Q & A with the National Post.
He suggests that our focus should shift away from cooling entire homes, when one air-conditioned room should suffice.
“Imagine our current scenario, say, in the American Sunbelt, where a husband and wife get up in a 3,000 square foot air-conditioned house, get into two air-conditioned cars and commute to an office block that has been sitting there, getting cooled all night in preparation for the workday. Meanwhile, back home, that 24,000 cubic feet is being cooled with nobody in the house.”
The energy wasted to fuel such lifestyles nonsensical.
Most people would tend to agree that common sense should govern all aspects of life, which makes the need to wear a sweater at work to fend off the chill of air-conditioning quite frankly absurd.
Especially when the implications of over-consumption caused blackouts cause major headaches, headaches that could be avoided if prudence was still considered a virtue.