The cover of Losing Our Cool by Stan Cox (The New Press, 2010)

…will soon be published by The New Press, and I just received an advance copy in the mail because I first met the author, Stan Cox, in 2005 as the owner of Edible Estate Regional Prototype #1: Salina, Kansas, and since then I have been keeping up with his prolific environmental and political writings – I can’t wait to read this new book…

In Losing Our Cool, the first book to probe the critical role that air-conditioning plays in contemporary life, Stan Cox shows how indoor climate control is colliding with an out-of-control outdoor climate. In the United States alone, energy consumed by home air-conditioning and the resulting greenhouse emissions have doubled in just over a decade; energy used to cool retail stores has risen by two-thirds. Air-conditioning is approaching 20 percent of year-round electricity consumption by U.S. homes, the highest percentage in history. But air-conditioning has shaped human life in other, sometimes surprising ways that go far beyond the monthly utiliity bill.

(book website)