Translator: Joseph Geni
Reviewer: Morton Bast
I was one of those kids that, every time I got in the car,
I basically had to roll down the window.
It was usually too hot, too stuffy or just too smelly,
and my father would not let us use the air conditioner.
He said that it would overheat the engine.
And you might remember, some of you,
how the cars were back then, and it was
a common problem of overheating.
But it was also the signal that capped the use,
or overuse, of energy-consuming devices.
Things have changed now. We have cars that we take across country.
We blast the air conditioning the entire way,
and we never experience overheating.
So there's no more signal for us to tell us to stop.
Great, right? Well, we have similar problems in buildings.
In the past, before air conditioning, we had thick walls.
The thick walls are great for insulation. It keeps the interior
very cool during the summertime, and warm during the wintertime,
and the small windows were also very good because
it limited the amount of temperature transfer