Cities Dependent on Air Conditioning Might Be More Sustainable Than We Think

There's a commonly held heuristic that the least sustainable cities in America are the Southern ones. They are generally newer metros built in the age of the car (in large part because no one wanted to live there before we also invented the air conditioner). Particularly in the Southwest, there's never enough water to go around. And it takes tons of energy to keep the people who live in these places cool. Right?

A closer look at the math of indoor climate control suggests that, at least on this last point, southern cities may in fact be more sustainable than their older, bitterly colder brethren in the north. We're looking at you, Minneapolis. Michael Sivak, a research professor at the University of Michigan, compared Minnesota's largest city (and the coldest major metro in the U.S.) with Miami (our warmest metro on average), looking at the energy it takes for the two just to keep themselves at livable temperatures.