I just bought a sweater. After reading “Worn: A People’s History of Clothing,” by Sofi Thanhauser (interviewed in this issue), I went online and found a second-hand gray wool henley originally sold by a company with a reputation for well-made clothing. I wanted something I could wear this winter and for many winters to come; the antithesis of fast fashion. And if I’m completely honest, I’ll admit that watching yet another season of “All Creatures Great and Small,” which takes place more than 80 years ago in Northern England, had something to do with it. Every episode is like a fashion show of old-timey wool apparel: tweed suits, herringbone caps, cardigans, cable-knits — all of it looking incredibly cozy, if a little scratchy.
Yesterday I wore my new (to me) sweater for the first time. On the morning’s walk for childcare dropoff, the thermometer hovering around freezing, I needed no jacket at all — just a hat and gloves. Back inside, though, I immediately found myself sweating, and so (working from home) I dropped the thermostat into the 50s for the day. Dressing in such insulation requires adjustments.
Heavy wool fabrics were developed for an era when indoor heating was inefficient and expensive. The heat from the hearths, wood stoves or even coal fireplaces of long ago wouldn’t have let anyone lounge around in light cotton layers as we do today. A quick look at now-quaint clothing gives us some indication. Think of the sleeping cap, worn because your head — the only part of the body not covered by a pile of blankets — still needed insulation in the chilly air of your bedroom.
More recent indicators reveal the inexorable rise of the thermostat. One study from the UK compared household surveys from 1978 and 1996 and found bedroom temperatures rose from about 59 degrees to 65. I reckon that the upward trend has continued, thanks in large part to improving insulation and heating technology. In the United States, energy use for heating a square meter of floor space has fallen by about 40% from the 1980s to today.
Given the efficiency gains, you might think that total energy use for heating would have fallen, but the opposite is true. Instead of pocketing the savings and celebrating a win for the planet, we have instead turned up the thermostat and built larger houses, buildings that would have been exorbitant to heat with older heating methods. As David Owen put it in “The Efficiency Dilemma” in The New Yorker (in one of my favorite environmental essays ever): “The problem with efficiency gains is that we inevitably reinvest them in additional consumption.”
This phenomenon is sometimes called rebound, and we see it as well in the summer. Air conditioners have gone from an expensive appliance used sparingly to a ubiquitous necessity (even for people without medical conditions that make them vulnerable to hyperthermia). As Owen writes, rebound is about shifting standards as well as efficiency gains. “[A]ccess to cooled air is self-reinforcing: to someone who works in an air-conditioned office, an un-air-conditioned house quickly becomes intolerable, and vice versa.”
Comfort standards ratchet up slowly, decade by decade, and I’m not sure how we undo it. It’s not just a matter of persuasion by crunchy environmental writers.
Vast industries benefit from rebound: fossil fuel corporations and developers that market spacious houses come to mind. It’s hard to imagine Toll Brothers building and selling houses with less square footage and lower ceilings. It’s wonderful that something as cheap as a cozy second-hand sweater could pay for itself in a few weeks of lower heating bills — but it’s only the consumers and the planet that benefit.
Bernard Brown, Managing Editor
