Jacobin recently published an article calling for a national and worldwide expansion of air-conditioning usage. In it the writer, Leigh Phillips, used the suffering of economically and ecologically stressed people and communities during heat waves as a rationale for doubling down on a technology that, at the same time it’s cooling the indoors today, is heating up the outdoors of tomorrow. So to assuage such climate concerns, he went on to call for a far-reaching expansion of nuclear power. I suggest that we go back and try to follow this trail of illogic. Vulnerability can’t be fixed with technology In the piece, Phillips acknowledges the long-observed fact that people die during heat waves primarily because they live alone and/or suffer from a chronic physical or mental illness and/or are poor and/or are very old or very young. Heat victims also tend to live in inadequate housing in economically forgotten, […]