Does air conditioning make people vote Republican?

Thanks to a lifetime of inhaling fresh lake breezes, Carrier was an industrious, healthy Yankee, who may have thought, "If I could figure out a way to box up this bracing Northern air, I could make millions ... and destroy the economy of upstate New York." When Carrier started his own company, he located the factory in Syracuse. It was the biggest blue-collar employer in town. At its peak, Carrier employed 6,200 workers. But in 1999, Carrier closed its centrifugal chiller factory -- and moved the jobs to North Carolina. Four years later, it shut down the container refrigeration plant and the compressor plant -- and moved the jobs to Georgia. Now the town is so desperate for bodies it has a program called "Come Home to Syracuse," which begs its prodigal youth to return.

You can hardly blame Carrier. It's cheaper to do business down South. In the B.C. of A/C, when a Northern city was the only practical location for a factory, companies were forced to make deals with stubborn, thick-knuckled union bosses. Norma Rae notwithstanding, the South does not have a strong labor movement. Mercedes-Benz built its latest plant in Tuscaloosa, Ala., an industrial feat that would have been impossible without air conditioning. When General Motors introduced the Saturn, it built the plant in Tennessee. Detroit, GM's hometown, has lost dozens of factories, and over a million citizens, many of them to air-conditioned cities. With its empty city blocks abandoned to pheasants and crickets, it now looks like a laboratory run of what will happen to the earth after the human race disappears.

It's easy to write this now because we've had a cool summer in Chicago. The temperature has never topped 91 degrees. On Monday night, I turned on the bedroom fan for the first time all of August. But I moved here on the day the Great Heat Wave of 1995 spiked. I nearly fainted carrying furniture up a flight of stairs. Over 500 people suffocated to death inside their apartments. Air conditioners would have saved lives, but it's too simple to say the heat wave victims died just because they didn't have them. Most were old, alone and afraid to open their windows. Some died not because they lacked air conditioning, but because they lacked it in an air-conditioned society. The traditional method of cooling off in a heat wave -- camping out in the parks -- is no longer acceptable. No one looked in on those people because, in the age of air conditioning, it's hard to remember that a heat wave can cull the weak and the elderly.

"I guess you need air conditioning when you get older," my grandmother tells me. "Electricity's really gone up, but I'm going to keep it as long as I can."

Ultimately, she plans to adopt my solution to summer heat: Live somewhere people don't need air conditioning. Her house is on the market, and as soon as it sells, she's moving to be near my uncle. In Alaska.