LosingOurCool 

The Book

"Cox provides the first-ever book-length look at the consequences on our environment and on our health of air-conditioning in this enlightening study. He documents how greenhouse emissions increased and ozone depletion skyrocketed once air conditioners became prevalent, and presents staggering statistics: the amount of electricity Americans use for powering their air conditioners alone equals the same amount the 930 million residents of Africa use for all their electricity needs. Cox reveals some surprising information as he explores air conditioning as a potential spreader of contagions ...  He offers a reality check to proposed solutions that have fatal flaws (and may be worse than the problems they attempt to solve) including “dematerialization,” improved AC energy efficiency, and clean energy options. In addition, he provides a list of changes that will help: reducing indoor heat, using fans, utilizing “cool” roofs, and increasing vegetation. Well-written, thoroughly researched, with a truly global focus, the book offers much for consumers, environmentalists, and policy makers to consider before powering up to cool down."  -- Publishers' Weekly

 

See the Table of Contents

Losing Our Cool in the Media:

Stan Cox in the Washington Post on "D.C. without A.C."

New York Times: "No Air-Conditioning and Happy"

Cox in the Los Angeles Times on how we live and work in the A/C world

Chicago Sun-Times: Mark Brown tries to convince his wife to turn of the A/C

Hear an interview with NPR's Marketplace, as well as some tips

Kevin Canfield on Losing Our Cool in the Los Angeles Times

Watch the KSN-TV report, also seen on the Weather Channel and NBC affiliates across the U.S.  

An interview with Ryan Brown of Salon.com

Cox on the A/C life in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Tom Condon on Losing Our Cool in the Hartford Courant

Cox talks with National Geographic News Watch

Hear "Chilling Facts About Air Conditioners", a one-hour interview and call-in with Stan Cox on the NPR program On Point

Rob Sharp in The Independent (UK): Cold Comfort

Cox answers adversaries via CounterPunch

The Wichita Eagle on Losing Our Cool

Losing Our Cool interview: video on MSNBC

A review by the Dallas Morning News

Hear “Life without Air-Conditioning” on The Takeaway

An article on Losing Our Cool in the Boston Globe.

A Minneapolis Star-Tribune interview

An interview with the National Post‘s Joe O’Connor

Macleans: How Air-Conditioning Changed the World

An A/C  Q&A with Discovery’s Planet Green

How to stay cool without A/C even in America's hot zones

A CBC Radio interview

The Hartford Courant: Air-Conditioning is Sapping Our Society

Paul Cox: "Birth of the Air Conditioner"

A review on the Cleveland Plain Dealer site

A Globe and Mail interview on staying cool in Canada

A May 19 story in the Salina Journal.

 

  Losing Our Cool is published by The New Press.
                     

Sick Planet

Sick Planet was published in 2008 by London's  Pluto Press.  If you judge a book by its cover and if, instead of making you feel at one with nature, this cover makes you feel a bit queasy, that's intentional -- and the book will have the same effect.  Sick Planet tells nine stories in which the global capitalist economy turns the well-intentioned efforts of humanity inside-out.  By the tenth chapter, it will be clear that neither organic chicken soup nor full medical coverage can cure what ails this planet.  Read more about what's inside Sick Planet

"Sick Planet is a must-read for anyone concerned about matters of health and survival – that is everyone." -- Vandana Shiva

"Cox’s revelatory book is a Silent Spring for the 21st century." -- Jeffrey St. Clair

Some of Stan Cox's recent writing

More articles

Response?

Write to t.stan@cox.net

Stan Cox

is a plant breeder and writer living in Salina, Kansas. His previous book was Sick Planet.

Go to the
Losing Our Cool blog

"What I like about Cox's book is that he isn't an eco-nag or moralist . . . I agree with Cox when he says less climate control and more contact with the real ecosphere will make for a happier and healthier country." -- Tom Condon, The Hartford Courant

"Our desire for cool is warming our world, and it’s a vicious cycle: more global heating, more need for cooling, which means more coal mined and burned, more coal-fired electricity, more air conditioning, more planetary heating, and more need for cooling. Stan is asking us to break this vicious cycle. He is also asking us to to realize that a life of more money and  more energy is not always a better life." -- Dennis Dimick, executive editor, National Geographic

"Human beings lived for a very long time without air conditioning. It's an open question, given our environmental predicament, how long we can live with it, and Stan Cox offers both some sobering facts and some interesting strategies for thinking through a big part of our energy dilemma." --
Bill McKibben, author Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

"As corporatization of the world's water supply threatens our access to the most basic of our needs, the widespread use of air conditioning puts our environment--and us--at risk. This book is the go-to source for a better understanding of the complexity of pumping cold air into a warming climate. Cox makes a strong case for pulling the plug on air conditioning, and soon, if we want to ensure a more comfortable future." -- Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water

Order
Losing Our Cool

 

About Sick Planet:

"A radical treatment proposal, to be sure, but the diagnosis is sobering."

--  The Guardian

"The pharmaceutical and food industries are increasingly intertwined. Their public relations machines claim that they, and only they, can offer planetary salvation ... In Sick Planet, Stan Cox guides us through the chicanery and lies on which modern agricultural and pharmaceutical capitalism depend, and gives us not only a stunning indictment of our modern food and drug system, but the analytical vision to move beyond it."

--  Raj Patel, author, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System


"Cox does not dedicate the bulk of his outrage to the depredations of capitalists but to the false solutions proposed by certain environmentalist sectors which he views as naive and delusional, and are doing more harm than good ... The author concludes that one cannot conceive -- much less build -- an ecological society without there being a broad consensus that the current economic system, founded on never ending growth, cannot be part of a new society."

- Carrmelo, Ruiz, journalist and director of the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety.



Published by
HarperCollins-India
2009:



and in Korean translation by
Nanjange Books:

 

"At the cusp of total ecological collapse, we stand in need of a corrective dose of 'radical' economics if we're to turn our ship around.   Cox's Sick Planet will be useful reading for anyone who seeks to grab the ship's wheel and to persuade others to join them. His book is a short, readable activist's crib which ranges fluently across the environmental costs of bloated corporate healthcare (and the human costs of overprescription and phoney medicalization), to the problem of industrial agriculture and "better living through chemistry."

— Sam Urquhart, GNN.TV


“Stan Cox, scientifically accomplished and politically astute, casts a sharp eye on the deadly affliction that threatens our planet, and identifies the penetration of capital into all aspects of life as the pathogen. Cox convincingly shows that only a radical attack on the roots of this disease can reverse the slide of our civilization into oblivion.”

— Joel Kovel, author, The Enemy of Nature