The planet’s growing appetite for air conditioning and refrigeration is creating a surge in energy consumption that will, by mid-century, overtake the amount of power used for heating while making global warming worse, a published report says.

In a series of reports, The Guardian reports the demand for cooling is going up steeply as a result of rising global temperatures and an expanding middle class that can afford to stay comfortable.

Power consumption for cooling is expected to be 33 times what it is now by 2100. Already, the U.S., with 4.5% of the world’s population, uses more energy for air conditioning that the rest of the world combined, a related report said. The U.S. (population 318 million) uses more energy for cooling than Africa (with a population of more than 1 billion) uses for everything.

“Cold has become a hugely significant–yet almost unsung–part of our energy footprint,” said Nick Winser, who heads a technology and innovation center in the UK. “We know the energy landscape is going to be very different in the near future. We need to see cold’s place in it; start thinking of heat and cold as parts of one integrated system.” 

Staying cool is a hot business, and full or risks

Citing Losing Our Cool, a book by Stan Cox, the report notes the demand for air conditioners is surging everywhere, but particularly in Asia. Chinese shoppers took home 50 million air conditioning units in 2010, and the proportion of Chinese homes with refrigerators went from just 7% in 1995 to 95% in 2007.

It’s not just AC units and the kitchen fridge: many medicines must be chilled, and a variety of industries, such as steel, chemicals, and plastics, all rely on some type of refrigeration. Huge data centers that handle internet traffic and cloud computing must be kept refrigerated.

Those trucks that haul refrigerated food? “According to a report by the energy consultancy E4tech,” The Guardian reported, “the small diesel-powered fridges on food trailers emit nearly 30 times more harmful particulate matter and six times more nitrogen oxides than the engine that powers the trucks.

Mechanical refrigeration needs both electricity and chemical refrigerants with a high global-warming potential. Three-quarters of the electricity used for air conditioning and refrigeration is generated by fossil fuels, the report says, and the hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants that are commonly used are 4000 times more potent as greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Refrigerant leaks and energy use for cooling already account for about 10% of global CO₂ emissions already.

Rising temperatures globally are making the problem worse. Parts of the Persian Gulf will be too hot for human habitation by the end of the century if carbon dioxide emissions continue at their current rate, the Associated Press says. The Greenland ice sheet is now one of the biggest chunks of melting ice on the planet, The New York Times says in an article. 

Better approaches are possible

Refrigeration has a crucial role to play in the world’s supply of food, a third of which is now wasted after harvest, the article said. Cutting food waste by half would be enough to feed 800 million people, but almost all of the money spent on agriculture research is about increasing yields, not making refrigeration more efficient and more available.

More research and applied research would help. Better building designs, for example, would reduce cooling loads and cut the need for air conditioning. Toby Peters, visiting professor of power and the cold economy at the University of Birmingham, suggested cheaper off-peak renewable energy could be used to make ice at night and cool buildings the next day. “We store heat,” he said, “why aren’t we storing cold?”

(That’s exactly the approach adopted experimentally in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where thermal-energy storage units called “Ice Bears” produce ice at night, and release the cold during the day, according to The Boothbay Register.)

Other promising ideas include finding a way to capture the cold used to transport liquified natural gas, currently dumped at sea.

“We just need to think about cold differently,” Peters told The Guardian. “Because solving cold, really doing it smarter, would actually do more to help the world meet its climate-change targets than almost anything else I can think of.”