How the air conditioning of Kansas homes is like an old-timey carnival trinket

Memories of old-time carnival gave Friday columnist Eric Thomas a striking insight into the world's climate crisis. (Illustration by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)

I don’t remember many epiphanies that I had as a fourth grader. But I remember one.

I was standing in the tiled hallway of my suburban elementary school while other kids squealed and raced past the open classroom doors. On this day, the entire campus — the gymnasium, the parking lot, the playground and the classrooms — transformed into our annual carnival.

The parent-teacher association provided all of the classic games. There was a cake walk (always choose the red velvet). The music room had a contest in which lucky students went home with live goldfish (sorry, parents). And then there were dozens of games with penny trinkets as the prize.

My epiphany came from the finger trap.

Perhaps you remember these from your childhood, too. Or maybe your kids brought one home this summer from a friend’s birthday party. I won mine by flipping over the lucky rubber ducky floating in a kiddie pool that stretched out on the floor of the first grade classroom.

The finger trap was a green-and-pink woven tube, about 6 inches long. Slide a finger into each end — so innocent, simple and safe.

But try to escape by pulling your fingers away from one another and you will discover the trap. The harder you try to escape, the more stuck you become.

This truism came to me, a 10-year-old, as an epiphany. It was a physical logic puzzle with a counterintuitive solution. (In part, that is how the gimmick became known by another name that rests on stereotypes.)

The finger trap remains memorable because of its metaphorical lesson: Forcing things can make them worse.

That’s why I was thinking about finger traps last week — four decades later — on a summer vacation to Europe.

The continent has descended into a hot and stewy fever. The Swiss and Italians that we met spent equal time welcoming us and apologizing for the heat. The oppressive weather has triggered wildfires, likely killing more than 10,000 people and rewiring daily life.

As a Kansan, you’re nodding along. We have been baking too — just look at our run of 100-plus degree heat index readings.

What’s different for the Europeans is air conditioning — or rather, the lack of it.

In Kansas, more than 9 in 10 homes have air conditioning, according to 2000 data from the U.S. Energy Information Association. According to that data, 85% of Kansans have central air, while about 15% rely on individual window-style units. A more recent study from the U.S. Census Bureau estimates 98.6% of occupied homes in Kansas have air conditioning.

Almost every business provides AC, as well. When I visited the local Costco warehouse store today, enormous garage doors at the front of the store yawned wide open, sharing the football fields of cold air with the sizzling sidewalk outside.

The Shawnee Mission school district this week showed off its air-conditioned buses.

Also this week, I sat in the passenger seat with a fellow Kansan at the wheel. She explained how she loves setting the car’s air-conditioning to 58 degrees while opening the sun roof to let in the sun and fresh air.

“It’s the perfect mix,” she said.

I stared back blankly.

Then — being the ultimate buzz kill that I am — I described the suffering in Europe. During our days as tourists, our group discovered how draining the non-stop heat can be. Outdoor restaurants thirsted for more shade. Rolling AC units snaked through small boutiques. One winery became a de facto sauna. Climate change is transforming the quaint cobbled streets into skillets and clay houses into ovens.

As Kansas tourists, we realized how much we take for granted each day in America with our customary intermittent reprieves: when we step into a chilled shop or rest in an air-conditioned restaurant.

With high temps outside and no AC, there’s no relief in Europe.

As the New York Times reported during the heat wave, many Europeans resist air conditioning for both cultural and environmental reasons. Some balk at making air conditioning part of daily life. Others correctly worry that more air conditioning and its required energy use will further accelerate climate change.

Here in Kansas, we wrap our loving arms around AC. Our state uses almost 30% of our household energy consumption on air conditioning and the air handlers that are part of air conditioning units. This consumption ranks eighth in the nation out of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, according to the Energy Information Association.

Besides air conditioning, other forms of household energy consumption in Kansas place us near the national average. For instance, we rank near the middle in energy use on TVs and related equipment and 40th in energy spent on clothes washers. But air conditioning is a Kansas household priority.

Kansas and Oklahoma expend essentially the same amount of energy on air conditioning as a part of their whole energy budget. Every other state bordering Kansas uses at least 12% less. Just to the north, Iowa uses more than 36% less on air conditioning. It’s clear that we Kansans could use less by dialing up the thermostat a few degrees.

To be fair, our summer temperatures on the plains likely fuel this consumption. Only southern states such as Texas, Nevada and Florida spend more of their household energy dollars on AC than Kansas. Arizona, for instance, spends a staggering 46.75% of household energy on air conditioning.

(Yes, I acknowledge my AC complicity in this. After all, while we were in Europe, our son was back in the Kansas suburbs in a five-bedroom house cooled just for him — and our dog.)

Why does the tug of war between climate change and air conditioning remind me of the carnival novelty finger trap?

As we Kansans struggle to escape the heat, we dial down the temps in our houses. But that air conditioning demands fossil fuel and accelerates the rise in global temperatures. Escaping this week’s heat makes it less likely that we will escape the larger, global heat wave of climate change.

Europe is heating more quickly than the rest of the world. The continent relies on the cooling effect of the Arctic ice sheet. The reflective white of the arctic is melting away day by day during the summer, replaced by the dark blue hue of the ocean, which absorbs heat.

As my friend and I hiked through a valley in Switzerland, we gawked at the color of the river surging past our gravel path. Even after years of hiking in the Colorado mountains, I had never seen a mountain stream so frothy and white. The river appeared almost chemically treated, like the slurry of detergent and water from a washing machine.

The milky appearance results from rapid glacial thaw, we learned. The glaciers in the surrounding mountain store rock “flour,” tiny bits of rock that eventually cloud the rivers.  This summer has been particularly damaging to glaciers, which have been melting at unprecedented rates and thereby making the rivers murky.

In short, Europe is disproportionately warmed by our Kansas air conditioning.

To make my tortured finger trap metaphor hold for worldwide climate change and air conditioning, we must add another wrinkle.

As I stood in the hallway, fourth-grade me realized that he only needed to relax to escape the finger trap. Expend less energy? A quick escape.

However, the collective action problem of climate change demands that everyone work together to escape together. We must have a coordinated effort that relaxes our habits, dials down our thermostats and burns less fossil fuel.

The alternative: that we end up stranded in a trap of our own making.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.