[QUOTE=elfkin477]
I read half the posts on the first page before I realized that this is mostly about air-conditioning, not heat; only the heat in my home is controlled by the wall themostat, and the ACs each have their own themostats. In order for your themostat to control the AC too, not the heat, you have to have a central system, don’t you? Are they common in CA? Such systems aren’t the majority around here, but it only gets hot 4 months of the year. Are they fairly standard out west? Enough so that the majority of homes would actually be effected by the plan?
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For those who are unfamiliar with the conditions in California, a bit of detail might be helpful here. I grew up in Sacramento, the state capitol, which is smack in the middle of the Central Valley. If you live in the major valleys, most of Southern California, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Range and parts of the San Francisco Bay Area the reality of summer is excruciating heat. In Sacto, it’s quite common for 100+ degree F temperatures to begin as early as late April or early May and go on through September or October. Most of California gets less than 30 inches of rain a year, some areas considerably less than that. It’s not uncommon to go from May to September without a single drop of rain falling. Humidity is mostly nonexistent.
It’s very unusual to find houses built in the last 30-40 years that don’t have central air conditioning systems. Blackout and brownouts are not uncommon during summer heat waves, where temperatures can be over 100 for days or sometimes weeks at a time, with nighttime temperatures maybe as low as the mid to high '80s–and unless you live in just the right place to catch a Delta breeze there is no wind activity to speak of. To give some real perspective, I personally have experienced temperatures as high as 125 F (in Redding, late '70s) and the day I left California for good the temperature was 113 F with a pollution standard index of 175, which in real world terms means the air smelled horrifyingly foul, it was incredibly hard to breathe and people with compromised lung function are advised to stay the hell indoors. With the A/C on, because the filtering action helps cut down on particulates that affect breathing.
California has been one long series of fights caused by too many people fighting over too limited resources. The Central Valley is incredibly rich farmland–but you need water to make it bloom. LA is a gigantic city which drains water from the Colorado River at a rate that would make you cry to see it. Northern California farmers fight with Southern California over water rights–but SoCal has the majority of voters.
California has battled unbelievably bad pollution conditions and has had to implement draconian legislation to keep the air breathable. For instance, rice is a major crop in the Central Valley–the easiest way to prepare the huge fields for the next crop is to burn the stubble and this used to be common up to when I was a young adult. It was not uncommon for inversion layers to trap the smoke and reduce visibility to less than 500 feet–for days at a time. Rice stubble is very high in silica and the pollution caused major breathing disorders and asthma in a large percentage of the population, but the agricultural lobby is very strong and managed to fend off legislation preventing rice stubble burning for years after the health risks were made public. In SoCal, I can remember similar conditions caused by car smog and inversion layers that were actually painful to the eyes and lungs after mere minutes of exposure coming down the Grapevine into the San Fernando Valley–horrible stench, too.
California is a “paradise on earth” that everybody wants to move to and is horribly overpopulated considering it’s just one big desert. All the “wacky environmental laws” people marvel at who don’t live there are actually damned necessary to keep people from dying in various nasty ways–because most of the citizens flatly refuse to voluntarily subject themselves to any deprivation for the common good. When Northern California was having such a horrible drought that we couldn’t flush the toilets unless we took at at least one shit in there we got to see Angelenos on the news watering their lawns and playing in their swimming pools–water diverted from NoCal via the California Aqueduct (with about 1/3 of the diverted water lost to evaporation on the way.)
As someone who managed to live for five years in a single wide mobile home that had NO A/C of any kind after the swamp cooler broke I find it reprehensible to see people seriously intending to circumvent thermostats that will cause higher than desired temperatures for everyone so’s not to cause random people to have not only NO A/C, but NO power AT ALL in order to stretch available reserves. Not to mention that intentionally overheating the thermostat causes a higher load on the A/C unit and uses even MORE energy–nice going! Also, 80 degrees is unbearable? Good grief, do you people listen to yourselves? I don’t have any A/C at all because I consider it environmentally dodgy at best and when it gets hot here in Oregon (not nearly as often as in Cali, thank goodness!) my house can get up to 93 F inside–so I go out on the back porch with a fan and a spray bottle. After sundown, when the demand for energy is less, I set up breezeboxes to exhaust the interior warm air and cool the house down for the night. It ain’t rocket science. Besides, the main reason why A/C feels good is that it lowers humidity–in arid climes evaporative coolers work beautifully and are great for the skin but Californians tend to refuse to use them because they’re noisy and “low class.” Yes, I’ve actually hears Angelenos express that exact point of view in those exact words. The entitlement is palpable at times.
The best solution for California would probably be kicking out about 35% or more of the people who live there. Since that isn’t feasible, people are going to have to realize that the more people you jam into a finite ecosystem the less comfortable each individual person is likely to be. It’s just logic and simple fairness that insisting that YOU be perfectly comfortable at all times because YOU can afford it is not equitable considering the people who could die because YOUR excess caused their lack.
My credentials here, aside from 35 years spent living in Cali, are that both my father and my ex husband worked for the Department of Water Resources (one of them in a department which built power plants of various types) and I also did multiple research papers in college on the California Aqueduct and various alternative energy sources, including geothermal power plants and wind generators–many of which were blocked by NIMBYism back in the day when they would have been much cheaper to build and would have forestalled some of the current problems. Getting California voters to agree to do anything which might threaten their entitlements or impede their view has historically been an uphill battle. This is why I live in Oregon now.
