Why anyone would be smugly indifferent to the ill-effects of air conditioning or any other technology is beyond my comprehension.

The scale at which we have applied the technology of air conditioning is an unmitigated mistake. That mistake has engendered harm, even death, to human beings as well of other parts of God’s creation. Even if ignorance can possibly moot the issue of morality, once an ongoing mistake is known to cause harm, it is immoral (according to my beliefs concerning morality) to fail to take steps to stop the harm.

When you say that air conditioning has “saved lives,” you fail to acknowledge that the heat waves were the result of changes to the climate that the burning of fossil fuels, to which air conditioning has contributed, have engendered. I grew up in the Deep South of the U.S. before air conditioning existed, an no one died from the heat unless that person was acting stupidly — over-exertion, lack of hydration, etc.

You equate air conditioning with refrigeration, but the environmental effects of those two technologies demonstrate that scale has everything to do with the matter. It is one thing to chill a virtually airtight, well-insulated box and another to make refrigerators of whole buildings. Even then, to refrigerate some buildings is one thing, to refrigerate more and more buildings is quite another.

The same matter of scale applies to the internal combustion engine. That is the other technology that has brought us to the brink of ecological ruin due to unthinking expansion of a useful but environmentally destructive innovation.

By the way, the reason we are feeling no ill-effects from the hole in the ozone is that we took steps to fix that problem. That brings us to that which separates human beings from animals: we have the capacity to anticipate. Animals can only react to whatever life presents to them. We can see what’s coming and take appropriate action — but not with smug indifference to dangers we are creating.