i don't know about YOU, but i sure need this article

i don't have ac at home (by choice). although i couldn't stay home last week with the temps in the 100s and high 90s.

i haven't finished this entire article but i still wanted to link to it. i have been practicing the rule #1 for many years. IT DOES work (most of the time).

Air-Conditioning Is Terrible for the Earth -- Here's How to Live Without It
This story was written by Stan Cox, Priti Gulati Cox, Chris George, Dani Moore, Sheila Stewart and John Stewart, with an introduction by Stan Cox.

Over the past decade, gains in the general energy efficiency of appliances have been wiped out by our growing reliance on one device in particular: the air conditioner. Just since the mid-1990s, as the U.S. population was growing by less than 15 percent, consumption of electricity to cool the residential, retail and automotive sectors doubled.

If people in India, Brazil and Indonesia used as much air-conditioning per capita as we do (and why not, their climates are hotter than ours), they would consume not only their own electricity supplies but also all of the electricity in Mexico, the United Kingdom and Italy -- plus all 60 nations of Africa! The air-conditioning of America's homes, businesses schools, and vehicles causes the release of greenhouse gases equivalent to 400 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.

But while working on Chapter 1 (pdf) of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World, I learned that there are still plenty of people who, out of ecological and other concerns, live without air-conditioning -- even in the hot heart of the Sunbelt................