Veteran sales and service pro Matt Michel starts to pixelate around the edges.
In his June encyclical on climate change, Pope Francis criticized air conditioning as both a cause and consequence of global warming. Ironically, our damaged environment encourages us toward more damaging behavior. He wrote:
A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning. The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive.
So bad news for Carrier. But what if the pope were wrong? What if, when it came to the moral trajectory of the 21st century, the head of the Catholic church didn’t know what he was talking about? What if you were better off asking—oh, I don’t know—an air conditioning service consultant?
Neither I, nor any other soul on this earth knows if the planet is warming or cooling, or whether man can significantly affect the climate. We know that despite all predictions and computer modeling, warming has inexplicably been paused since before the turn of the century. Nevertheless, if warming resumes, it will be air conditioning that will save humanity and ease the suffering from a warmer planet.
That’s not even the best paragraph in Matt Michel’s editorial, titled What the Pope Should Say About Air Conditioning. Discourse on motivated reason after the jump.