【新SAT写作】5月7日北美SAT写作考试阅读原文

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5月7日北美SAT写作考试文章源自Time， 题目为“Viewpoint：air-conditioning will be the end of us”，作者Eric Klinenberg呼吁为了人类的未来，减少使用空调。

以下是原文：

P1: Earlier this week, as the temperature in New York City hit the upper

90s and the heat index topped 100, my utility provider issued a heat alert and

advised customers to use air-conditioning “wisely.” It was a nice, polite

gesture but also an utterly ineffectual one. After all, despite our other green

tendencies, most Americans still believe that the wise way to use air

conditioners is to crank them up, cooling down every room in the house — or even

better, relax in the cold blasts of a movie theater or shopping mall, where

someone else pays the bills. Today Americans use twice as much energy for

air-conditioning as we did 20 years ago, and more than the rest of the world’s

nations combined. As a climate-change adaptation strategy, this is as dumb as it

gets.

P2: I’m hardly against air-conditioning. During heat waves, artificial

cooling can save the lives of old, sick and frail people, and epidemiologists

have shown that owning an AC unit is one of the strongest predictors of who

survives during dangerously hot summer weeks. I’ve long advocated public-health

programs that help truly vulnerable people, whether isolated elders in broiling

urban apartments or farm workers who toil in sunbaked fields, by giving them

easy access to air-conditioning.

P3: I also recognize that air conditioners can enhance productivity in

offices and make factories safer for workers who might otherwise wilt in searing

temperatures. Used conservatively — say, to reduce indoor temperatures to the

mid-70s in rooms that, because of shortsighted design, cannot be cooled by

cross-ventilation from fans and windows — air conditioners may well generate

enough benefits to balance the indisputable, irreversible damage they generate.

But in most situations, the case for air-conditioning is made of hot air.

P4: What’s indefensible is our habit of converting homes, offices and

massive commercial outlets into igloos on summer days, regardless of how hot it

is outdoors. Recently, New York City prohibited stores from pumping arctic air

out onto the searing sidewalks in an attempt to lure customers while burning

through fossil fuels in suicidal fashion. I can’t help but wonder whether cities

like New York will ever prohibit stores from cooling their facilities below,

say, 70°F. No doubt a law like that would raise even more objections than Mayor

Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to ban big sodas, but it might well be necessary if

we can’t turn down the dial on our own.

P5: I’m skeptical that American businesses and consumers will reduce their

use of air-conditioning without new rules and regulations, especially now that

natural gas has helped bring down energy bills and the short-term costs of

cranking the AC are relatively low. Part of the problem is that in recent

decades, the fastest-growing U.S. cities — places like Las Vegas, Phoenix and

Austin — have effectively been built on air-conditioning. (This is also true in

the Middle East and Asia, and as a result, global energy consumption is soaring

precisely when it needs to be lowered.) Throughout the country, most designs for

new office, commercial and residential property rely entirely on AC, rather than

on time-honored cooling technologies such as shading from trees and

cross-ventilation from windows and fans. As a result, there is now an

expectation that indoor air will be frigid on even the steamiest days everywhere

from the Deep South to the Great West. What’s worse, this expectation is

spreading to the nations where American culture carries influence; sales of air

conditioners rose 20% in India and China last year.

P6: Trying to engineer hot weather out of existence rather than adjust our

culture of consumption for the age of climate change is one of our biggest

environmental blind spots. If you can’t stand the heat, you should know that

blasting the AC will ultimately make us all even hotter. Let’s put our air

conditioners on ice before it’s too late.

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