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To my astonishment, the apartment stayed tolerable all weekend. The tile floors seemed to emanate coolness. The greenery surrounding my windows blocked direct sunlight and helped bring down the temperature of the outside air. I didn’t have a thermometer, but my guess is that the temperature inside never got above 80 degrees.
“You saw for yourself the power of passive cooling,” buildings scientist Alexandra Rempel told me. “It really can be amazingly, amazingly effective.
Rempel, an assistant professor in the environmental studies program at the University of Oregon, studies how to design buildings that can stay cool “passively,” without relying on air conditioning. The techniques that helped my apartment beat the heat — shade, building materials, strategic ventilation — can be used in almost any home, she explained.
On a warming planet, passive cooling can help protect people without access to air conditioning and lighten the load on the electrical grid from those who do. It can also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions produced by burning fossil fuels for power — a necessary step for tackling climate change and the only hope we have for avoiding an even hotter future.
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(Michael Parkin for The Washington Post)
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