CityLab Daily: How Americans Use Air Conditioning

A/C 360°: People love to fight about the social and environmental consequences of staying cool indoors. Air conditioning gets a bad rap as an energy hog, but it may not be the villain it’s sometimes made out to be. In fact, heating actually makes up most of America’s energy use for controlling indoor temperatures: The United States uses four times as much energy heating homes as it does cooling them.

Part of that is just a matter of having many cities that are relatively far north, but even warm-weather American cities spend considerably more energy on heating than cooling. The heating-cooling gap is shrinking, however, as warmer states have added population faster than cooler states in recent decades. Still, the biggest fight over air conditioning isn’t whether to have it, but how to set it. CityLab data reporter David Montgomery has the numbers on America’s air conditioning habits. Read: 8 Charts on How Americans Use Air Conditioning