Harold Goodman died in 1995 at the age of 68. Some of his coworkers compared him to Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, or Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines—populist businessmen who built empires by selling goods to the masses for the right price. “He was most proud of the jobs he created for people,” his daughter Betsy told me. “The company he built put food on the table for thousands of people.” By the time he died, Goodman Manufacturing—one of the world’s largest makers of air-conditioning units—was worth close to $1 billion.

For the next decade or so, the company was run by Goodman’s son, John. A private equity firm eventually bought the company for $1.5 billion. They later sold it for $3.7 billion to Daikin Industries, a Japanese manufacturing giant that already had several lines of air conditioners and was looking for ways to expand its market share. The acquisition of Goodman made Daikin the largest air-conditioning manufacturer in the world. In 2017, Daikin consolidated all of its air- conditioning manufacturing, sales, and distribution on a 500-acre campus about an hour east of Houston. The site is officially known as the Daikin Texas Technology Center, but it’s sometimes referred to by a more poetic name: the Comfortplex.

The Comfortplex is one of the largest factories in the U.S. (behind the Tesla factory in Austin and the Boeing Everett Factory in Washington). It covers 94 acres under one roof and employs 7,000 people. It’s the Taj Mahal of air-conditioning and a monument not just to Harold Goodman’s achievements, but to the ongoing human effort to control the Earth’s climate one machine at a time.

Inside, the Comfortplex feels like a giant Costco, cheaply built to build machines that sell cheaply. Out on the production floor, 15,000-pound rolls of aluminum sheets are unfurled and stamped into louvers, heat exchangers, and other air conditioner parts. Robotic carts scoot around, carrying tools and parts. Newly built air conditioners roll down the production line, robotic soldiers ready for deployment against the enemy of heat. Seven production lines run 24/7.

Globally, the demand for air-conditioning remains insatiable. There are over one billion single- room air-conditioning units in the world right now—about one for every seven people on Earth. By 2050, there are likely to be more than 4.5 billion units, making them as common as cell phones today. Southern Europe, Indonesia, and the Middle East have all become addicted to cheap cold air. In Qatar, they even air-condition the outdoors: open-air stadiums built for the 2022 World Cup had cool air piped over the fields. In China, it was rare to feel mechanically chilled air 20 years ago. Now more than 75 percent of homes in Beijing and Shanghai have some form of air-conditioning. Over the last decade, 10 percent of the skyrocketing electricity growth in China has been due to cooling. In a country that is still largely dependent on coal for power, this is a climate disaster.

As global air-conditioning dependence rises, the dangers of brownouts and blackouts rise along with it. During heat waves, when everyone cranks up the air-conditioning, the demand for electrical power spikes. “[In 2018] in Beijing, during a heat wave, 50 percent of the power capacity was going to air-conditioning,” John Dulac, an analyst at the International Energy Agency, told The Guardian. “These are ‘oh, shit’ moments.” Here in Texas, every heat wave is a nail-biter, with warnings coming from utilities to reduce power consumption or face rolling blackouts. On days when power demand is spiking, a small problem on the grid can easily cascade, threatening the stability of the entire system. And if power goes out for long on a hot day, businesses shut down, schools close, and people die.

Consider what happened in Hollywood, Florida, in 2017. A gentle sideswipe by Hurricane Irma knocked out power at a nursing home for several days, leaving it without air-conditioning. Outside, the temperature was only in the mid-80s—hardly a heat apocalypse. But inside the nursing home, in the poorly built, poorly ventilated, air-conditioning-dependent building, the temperature soared, especially on the upper floors. The nursing staff ignored the slowly broiling patients. It wasn’t until two days after the power failed that someone finally called 911. When Lieutenant Jeff Devlin from the Hollywood Police Department arrived, “It was markedly hotter on the inside than the outside,” he later testified in court. “The smell of urine and feces immediately hit me.” 12 patients died, some with body temperatures as high as 108 degrees.

*

Air-conditioning is a distinctly American invention, as red, white, and blue as a double cheeseburger with a Coke and a side of fries. And like hamburgers and Cokes, it quickly went from an American curiosity to a global addiction. “Comfort is valued because it promises consistency, normalcy, and predictability, which allow for increased productivity or a good night’s sleep,” architectural historian Daniel Barber wrote in an essay about our addiction to air-conditioning. “Comfort indicates that one has risen above the inconsistencies of the natural world and triumphed, not only over nature and the weather, but over chance itself. We can rely on comfort. It will be there when we get back.”

It’s a false victory, however. The quest for comfort at all costs—or to be more precise, the sense that comfort is an inalienable right of modern life—is wreaking havoc on our world. As Barber put it, “Comfort is destroying the future, one click at a time.”

There are ways to limit the damage. The most obvious one, which I’ve mentioned earlier and will say again: stop burning fossil fuels and move to clean energy. That may happen in some places faster than you think (at least for electricity generation). But it will also happen in some places more slowly than you might hope. So increasing the efficiency of air conditioners can help (in the U.S., new efficiency standards took effect in 2023).

Another way is to think differently about how we build things. The rise of air-conditioning accelerated the construction of sealed boxes, where the building’s only airflow is through the filtered ducts of the air-conditioning unit. It doesn’t have to be this way. Look at any old building in a hot climate, whether it’s in Sicily or Marrakesh or Tehran. Architects understood the importance of shade, airflow, insulation, light colors. They oriented buildings to capture cool breezes and deflect the worst heat of the afternoon. They built with thick walls and white roofs and transoms over doors to encourage airflow. Anyone who has ever spent a few minutes in an adobe in Tucson, or walked on the narrow streets of old Seville, knows how well these construction methods work. But all this wisdom about how to deal with heat, accumulated over centuries of practical experience, is all too often ignored. In this sense, air-conditioning is not just a technology of personal comfort; it is also a technology of forgetting.

In the end, the most enduring legacy of air-conditioning may be the divide it has created between the cool and the damned. And the hotter it gets, the bigger that gap will grow. This is not a technological failure as much as it is a cultural and psychological issue. The simple truth is that in the second half of the twentieth century, prosperous Americans got hooked on comfort, with little thought about the cost of that comfort to others, to the welfare of other species, or to the world around them. That addiction has now spread to millions of people around the world, who find they too cannot live without cheap cold air. ♦

Excerpted from THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST by Jeff Goodell. Published by Little, Brown and Company. Copyright © 2023 by Jeff Goodell. All rights reserved.