This is so good I really just had to share it with you. Michelle hits the nail on the head.
Holy Hypocrisy and Hot Air
June 24, 2015, 6:00 am
Unlike Pope Francis, I
believe that air-conditioning and the capitalists responsible for the
technology are blessings to the world.
Perhaps the head of the Catholic Church, who condemned “the
increasing use and power of air-conditioning” last week in a
market-bashing encyclical, is unaware of the pioneering private company
that has donated its time, energy and innovative heating, ventilating
and air-conditioning equipment to the Vatican’s most famous edifice for
more than a decade.
That’s right. While the pontiff sanctimoniously attacks “those who
are obsessed with maximizing profits,” Carrier Corporation — a $13
billion for-profit company with 43,000 employees worldwide (now a unit
of U.S.-based United Technologies Corp.) — ensures that the air in the
Vatican’s Sistine Chapel stays clean and cool.
Last fall, Carrier unveiled a groundbreaking HVAC system for the
Vatican to help preserve Michelangelo’s masterpieces against pollution
caused by the estimated six million visitors who descend on the Sistine
Chapel every year to see its famous frescoes.
As the company described it, their new solution “uses two Carrier
AquaForce(r) 30XWV water-cooled chillers with Greenspeed(r)
intelligence, each with 580 kilowatts of capacity. It leverages
specially designed software and components, as well as patented,
energy-saving technologies to maintain optimal climate conditions for
the protection of the paintings within the chapel.” State-of-the-art
intelligent controls “anticipate visitor levels and adjust its
performance intuitively.” It also “delivers twice the efficiency and
three times the capacity of the former system, which was built and
installed by Carrier in the early 1990s.”
Here’s the lesson about air-conditioning capitalists that Pope
Francis fails to appreciate: Carrier’s technological know-how and
breakthroughs didn’t just descend from the clouds. As I recount in my
latest book, “Who Built That,” every perfectly chilled home, office,
movie theater, mall, factory, hospital, lab and museum owes its
existence to the profit-seeking pioneers of manufactured weather: Willis
Carrier and Irvine Lyle.
These early 20th-century inventive giants brought air-conditioning to
the market and to the masses. Willis Carrier was the
scientist-tinkerpreneur whose prolific stream of experiments and
epiphanies, beginning in 1902, fueled historic technological advances in
heating, refrigeration and air-conditioning. Irvine Lyle was the
mechanical engineer-turned-salesman who imagined countless new
commercial applications for Carrier’s work — and successfully turned
those ideas into a multibillion-dollar business through relentless
promotion, pitches, networking, advertising and outreach.
The scientists and their core team begged, borrowed and made stock
sales to friends and neighbors. Carrier even enlisted his dentist for
cash to get Carrier Engineering Corporation up and running in 1915.
Carrier, Lyle and five founding engineers together pitched in $32,600 in
start-up funds.
The Carrier capitalists risked it all in defiance of an economic
depression and amid the tumult of world war. They couldn’t afford their
own factory and scrounged for made-to-order parts wherever they could
find them. They dug into their own pockets to cover salary shortfalls.
The wealth wasn’t handed to them. Carrier and Lyle, farm boys who both
graduated from Cornell, drove their men hard and themselves harder.
The Carrier team sold its products to businesses, large and small,
that spanned the spectrum of human needs and wants. The pope should know
that in addition to sparing countless lives from death by heat wave,
Carrier designed a special system for Jonas Salk that helped maintain
constant temperatures in the vats where Salk’s poliovirus strains grew.
The Salk vaccine saved thousands of lives and spearheaded the vaccine
revolution.
From Hollywood to the pharmaceutical industry to textiles to the
retail industry to the military to homeowners, there isn’t a sector of
the American economy that Carrier and Lyle didn’t help transform. Their
zealous focus on helping businesses provide better products at cheaper
costs resulted in the invaluable byproducts of increased health, comfort
and happiness.
While the pope blames commercial enterprises and the “global market
economy” for causing “environmental degradation,” it is a worldwide
commercial enterprise made in America that solved the human-caused
degradation of, and environmental damage to, the Vatican’s most prized
art and assets.
If the pontiff truly believes “excessive consumption” of modern
conveniences is causing evil “climate change,” will he be shutting down
and returning the multimillion-dollar system Carrier generously gifted
to the Vatican Museums?
If not, I suggest, with all due respect, that Pope Francis do
humanity a favor and refrain from blowing any more hot air unless he’s
willing to stew in his own.