I see fans, obsessed with them. Engrossed in a story in a movie, this time it’s ‘The Dry’, the film adaptation of the bestseller by Australian Jane Harper, I get trapped in the blades that turn in the standing fan in the protagonist’s hotel room. The tape explains the investigation into the violent deaths of a family that would have succumbed to despair over the drought crisis. It’s a thrillerbut the fan steals all the scenes where it appears, a new object of desire and obsession, so unbearable is the heat that already suffocates us.
It is not cinema but reality that heated living has already earned a place in civil rights: the fight against energy poverty goes beyond the barrier of cold winters, because there are more months of heat waves, and if we are to continue defending the right to decent housing, legislators never imagined that climate shelters, those public air conditioning bunkers would outnumber the shady and cool places in the cities.
heat island
The city as a heat island already has scientific studies and testimonies of its effects and consequences, mortality statistics in waves of torrid temperatures and tropical nights. The air conditioning that allows you to live inside makes hell outside: raises the ambient temperature and pollutes, accelerating the climate crisis. But going out into the street to get some fresh air is not real with the crushing humidity and the extra heat given off by the concrete of the streets, buildings, cars. And you return to the interior, increasingly conditioned, a vault that increases the environmental thermal gap. Environmental awareness declines before the situation: we can better recycle plastics, reduce water consumption, but give up air conditioning…on a mental red line.
die in cities
37% of heat-related deaths worldwide are due to human-induced climate change, 30% in Spain, and the cities of Madrid and Barcelona are where this causality is most accused, the collaborative network has determined. of health, climate and environmental pollution researchers MCC. The Barcelona Institute for Global Health has gone further and this week presented another study on cities that concludes that emissions from homes fine particulate matter PM2.5 , are the most harmful to pollute the air. If we add to this the effect of using air conditioners, with their carbon dioxide emissions that further accelerate global warming, we are consuming ourselves in a vicious circle.
Cinemas and supermarkets
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I still keep in my memory the first Public Health advice given the heat waves at the end of the last century. “Take refuge in shopping centers and frozen areas of supermarkets, go to the movies‘. Barcelona promotes its 200 climate shelters in the city for another year, although many will be closed for holidays in August, and others, classified by their shadows outside, will be useless due to the Saharan dust or the lack of air to ventilate the air.
The era of indoor heated living is here to stayand it is up to us to minimize the contamination footprint that this implies, if we want to not just survive, but do so with a livable environment. Or we will see future generations leave their four climate-controlled walls as we have seen these days the Vanilla chimpanzee, raised in a laboratory for a decade, and amazed the first day he steps outside and discovers the celestial vault. That at least we have a sky left to breathe and admire.