About 39 million Americans don’t use AC. While many can’t afford it or don’t need it (yet, as the planet warms), some simply don’t like it.
Sweltering temperatures from Midwest to East Coast
Sweltering temperatures drove people to parks and fountains as heat wave warnings were in effect across the nation.
As the thermometer inside Shelley Snyder’s three-story Victorian home in Columbus, Ohio, hits 88 degrees, she is finishing a meeting with a new maid service, watering plants, and doing chores. And she’s doing it all without air conditioning.
Snyder said she is just fine without it. Even during heat advisories, she’s found ways to cope.
“We wait all winter so we can open the windows and doors and let fresh air and summer in,” she told a reporter on a day the heat index exceeded 100 degrees.
Snyder is one of about 39 million Americans − roughly 12% − who don’t use AC, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. While many can’t afford it or don’t need it because they live in cooler climates, others choose to forgo air conditioning to lower their carbon footprint. Then there are those like Snyder, who chooses to endure sweltering temperatures in her “big old house with high ceilings” and top-floor skylight windows that open.
“Ceiling fans just pull the cool air out of the basement right up through the house,” she said.
Though air conditioning can be life saving − particularly amid record setting heat waves like the one that scorched the country in late June − some people simply don’t like it, according to Gail Brager, director of the Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. Constant AC use can cause “experiential monotony,” Brager said.
“There’s nothing pleasurable about it,” she said. “It’s not healthy for our bodies to have the same conditions all the time, everywhere, and it’s also experientially, not very interesting or necessarily comfortable.”
Cooler cities and states don’t need AC – yet
Alaska leads the nation in going without AC, according to an analysis of U.S. Department of Energy data by University of California, Berkeley professor Lucas Davis. Just 7% of households there are air-conditioned, yet the state’s temperatures are rising exponentially as the planet warms.
Officials issued historic advisories during June’s heat wave in Alaska, where it’s warming two- to three-times faster than the global average.
In the lower 48 states, the least air-conditioned city is San Francisco, where nearly 55% of homes don’t have AC, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey.
Devin Carraway’s home is one of them. Carraway said he’s lived in the Bay Area for most of his life and heat waves are rare, thus eliminating the need for air conditioning. Even if the climate were to change, he said “AC is not going to be the first thing I do.”
“AC is throwing a lot of energy at a problem that needs to be solved through building design first,” Carraway said.
Instead, Carraway has opted to install insulation and a white roof, which absorbs less heat. He said solar panels on the roof and his neighbor’s “really wonderful Monterey cypress tree,” also help keep his home cool on the occasional hot days.
AC out of reach, assistance under threat
Many Americans simply can’t afford AC due to the rising costs of summer cooling. That could put them at higher risk of heat illness and death.
This summer, the average electric bill is projected to reach $784, the highest cost in at least 12 years, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. Black, Hispanic and lower income households are more likely to say they don’t have or don’t use air conditioners due to financial challenges, according to health policy organization KFF.
“Many are afraid to turn on the air conditioning because of the cost,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of NEADA.
There are state and federal programs that help customers on with limited income pay their energy bills, but Wolfe said they aren’t enough to meet the growing need. And the Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget would eliminate funding for one of those programs, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). If enacted, Wolfe said nearly 6 million households may have to go without air conditioning or heat.
Tuesday Adams, 56, of Cathedral City, California, may be one of them. She arrived at a county aid office June 25 clutching overdue utility bills topping $20,000 as temperatures hit 102 degrees. Southern California Edison has extended her deadline for more than a year, but she’s received a disconnection notice.
She said she has received LIHEAP help in the past, but tries not to ask too often. Informed about the looming elimination of all federal funds for the program, she didn’t mince words.
“They got to do something, they can not stop this program … there’s too many people out here really, really struggling … a lot of families are gonna be in the dark in this heat,” she said.
Giving up AC to break the ‘vicious cycle’ of climate change
Residential energy use, which includes cooling, heating and powering homes, accounts for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, according to a 2020 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
“It’s this really vicious cycle that air conditioning is contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, and then the warming temperatures are making us need air conditioning even more,” Brager said.
Stan Cox wants to break that cycle. The author of “Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World,” deploys fans or spends time in the basement on hot days at his home in Kansas, which is shaded by trees. As a result, he used 80% less electricity than his neighbors in similarly-sized homes last June, he said citing his utility bill.
He admits something of a “love-hate relationship” with the innovation. When he experienced central air as a kid in 1967, he thought he had “died and gone to heaven,” but he later came to dislike the contrast between indoor cold and outdoor heat. “I just didn’t like it,” he said.
But Cox does turn on the AC at least once each summer “just to make sure it’s still in good working order.”
“Or if we have people coming to dinner,” he said. “Because we can’t really invite people to dinner when it’s 85 degrees in the house.”
Back in Columbus, Ohio, Snyder’s neighbor has a large oak that partially shades her home in the morning. And when it does get toasty or stuffy inside, Snyder said she finds chores to do in her basement or outside.
Snyder has a portable window AC unit, but she reserves it only for visitors who stay the night. She hasn’t used it in 10 years.
“I appreciate air conditioning like the next guy,” she said. “Would I personally like to have it? Sure. I’ll be 70 this year. But I’ve gone this long without it.”
Contributing: Sara Chernikoff and Sarah Elbeshbishi, USA TODAY
