"MAKING YOUR LIFE WORSE ISN’T A SIDE EFFECT, IT’S A POLICY GOAL"
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punkah wallahs will serve
So Glenn Reynolds often reminds us, and here’s the latest example:
Biden Admin Targets Fridges, Freezers In Latest Slew of Appliance Crackdown
And this is what they’re planning:
WaPo: Why these homes in the hottest places don’t need AC.
All of these technologies have their contemporary equivalents: Electric fans, swamp coolers and insulation. But throughout the Earth’s hot zones, many of them in the Global South, the new technologies are expensive, and create dependence on erratic electrical grids and networks of production, commerce and transportation that are alien, and unsustainable.
The old technologies are also a resource: They offer a way forward, architecturally, culturally and climatically, not just for torrid zones in Egypt or Turkey, but for heavily populated regions throughout the world that rely on precarious sources of power. From Cairo to California, there are architects who are already incorporating these technologies in contemporary buildings. But there are multiple challenges: overcoming skepticism among people long dependent on modern systems, recalibrating what it means and feels like to be comfortable, and recovering and preserving the wisdom of vernacular systems.
The last of these challenges — undoing erasure and forgetting — is urgent. The few remaining houses from Fathy’s original plan are crumbling in New Gourna. In the searingly hot Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, in southeast Turkey, civil unrest and oppression has led to whole swaths of the ancient town, full of historic stone homes with complex fountain systems, being demolished. And in Cairo — where some of the world’s most sophisticated passively cooled houses were built centuries ago — decay, neglect and government sponsored demolition threaten to erase invaluable heritage.
“Recalibrating what it means and feels like to be comfortable”. Uh-huh — the hoi polloi will “recalibrate” themselves back to the misery of unrelenting heat, while the elite will do very well, thank you.
While it’s true that the most extreme green zealots like Extinction Now are demanding changes that will cause the immediate end of modern civilization, the power elite has a different plan: they will stay comfortable, well-fed, and prosperous, while the billion or so serfs left after elimination of the 5 billion or so earth’s surplus population comprises.
A fan called punkah is well documented from the early 17th century in India. A luxury only for the kings and wealthy, punkahs became very popular among British officers struggling with the hot and humid climate in India. Unlike a rotating fan, punkahs created a gentle breeze rather than an airflow and were operated by pulling a rope that usually passed through a hole in the wall. This allowed servants, called punkahwallahs, to sit in an adjacent room. … The punkahs travelled wide to elite dining rooms of the southern U.S. and Mexico, where slaves were used to generate a comforting cooling breeze and insect-free mealtimes. The job was tedious and poorly paid, if at all.
Our masters have no intention of serving as punkah wallahs — that will be your job.
