Beating the heat in California: Are you your neighbor’s AC keeper?

As the heat records were toppling across Southern California, whole neighborhoods sounded like hornets’ nests.

Air conditioners were droning night and day, ceaselessly churning out the chill to create indoor climate 20 or 30 degrees cooler than the outdoor one.

I set my AC so that it didn’t come on until the indoor temperature hit 78, the temperature some power companies advise in these incalescent times. And I was perfectly fine. But I know darn well that as the temperature rose, people at thousands of businesses and homes were twisting the thermostats down to 72 or even lower.

Were they being selfish, or sensible?

Set aside for a moment the cost of paying for those hours of extra degrees of chill; ignore, for now, the greenhouse gas/fossil fuel reasons not to use more energy. There’s a moral issue built into your thermostat.

Do you buy into the utilities’ request that we moderate the AC use to avoid brownouts and blackouts and keep the grid going for everyone?

I do. Does that make me a patsy, or a public-spirited patriot?

Maybe I do it in part because my father climbed electric poles for 40 years, and had to go out in wretched weather to make sure everyone’s juice kept flowing, and to fix it when it kept going out. So in our house, you didn’t waste a watt.

This question is about a lot more than air conditioning. It’s about social amity, about how we behave in disasters, hard times and shortages -- in fact, it’s about much of the way we behave, period.

During the wretched days of gas shortages in California in the 1970s and ’80s, the even-odd system of being allowed to buy gas according to the numbers on your license plate didn’t deter a few people from line jumping or even violence at the pumps. But for the most part it worked, because it seemed fair.

In this country, we’re invested in waiting our turn -- if we think the system is fair. If we decide it isn’t fair, then all bets are off and we can swarm and grab with the best of them, clearing the shelves of water and batteries and necessities before someone else does.

In a heat wave like this one, do we believe in fairness, that enough other people will go easy on the AC to make us do the same? Do we really believe, or care, that Los Angeles could go dark if we choose 72 degrees instead of 78? Is there enlightened self-interest in the argument that if we all are a little sparing on the juice, we can spare the grid and keep it churning out kilowatts for everyone?

Where did you set your thermostat?

I wonder where the tipping point is, the moment when we may see others who don’t play by the social compact? When we do see it, does that make us likelier to break the compact ourselves, to get what we can while we can get it?

Maybe we won’t find out -- this time. By Tuesday, it’ll be in the nice, well-behaved 80s again.

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