Air-Conditioning Has Made Texas Livable—And It’s Also Made Many of Us Big Wimps

My boyfriend’s mother, a Boston chemist whose early career involved visiting oil refineries across the globe, has a saying about Texas: “There’s no place colder than Houston in the summer.” Of course, it’s not the outside temperatures she’s referring to, which regularly top 100 degrees in the summertime, but the aggressively air-conditioned indoor climate. As she is wont to note, the cold is intended for the comfort of those who wear suits—the sleeveless among us be damned.I was reminded of her adage in 2022, when I attended a Houston carbon capture expo amid a mid-June heat wave. Enviro-capitalists milled around a huge convention center that showcased the latest in technology that removes CO2 from the atmosphere or prevents it from being released, and promised to…

The post Air-Conditioning Has Made Texas Livable—And It’s Also Made Many of Us Big Wimps appeared first on Texas Monthly.