Global Warming Brings Air Conditioning to San Diego Schools

Global warming is melting glaciers and raising the level of the oceans, phenomena that, unless you live in the mountains or along a coast, may be obscured to you. Well, as in this story, climate change is coming home, or at least to school, here in San Diego.

            Responding to the rising temperatures in their classrooms, the San Diego Unified School District announced that it is installing air conditioning in the district’s schools. Parents and teachers complained that at the beginning of this school year temperatures in the 90s afflicted classrooms for several days. Children struggled to learn in the oppressive heat, and some fainted or fell ill.

            San Diego natives and folks who have lived here a long time have bragged that the weather here is so pleasant that air conditioning is never needed, even during the months of July and August when much of the rest of the country is sweltering. I’ve lived here for decades and have never lived in a house with air conditioning or an air conditioner.

            The obvious irony here is that the air conditioning will use electricity, the production of which is one of the drivers of climate change. The proposed program includes the installation of solar panels and thus promises to be carbon neutral. But the fact remains that the now needed air conditioning will be using electricity from those solar panels that could have been used for something else had we not been raising the thermostat on the planet with all the CO2 we’re throwing up in the air.

            And to those who have complained that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will adversely affect our economy, installing all that air conditioning in all to all those schools in San Diego will cost $204 million. That is $204 million in taxes. And all of it to be taxed and spent on something that would not have been needed if we had started reducing emissions when we first knew of the connection between burning fossil fuels and a warmer planet.

            Are you a San Diego schoolteacher? A parent? Student? Have you suffered through sweltering classrooms? As a taxpayer, what do you think?