Like most history lessons, it felt distant to me, a crisis that once happened, but was now over, solved by the world banding together in the form of the Montreal Protocol treaty to phase down and ban ozone-destroying CFCs for the good of everyone. Previously, the most I had been exposed to of the latter was learning of the ozone crisis in school. Otherwise, how am I to learn or grow as a person?Īfter Cooling's main topic is the history of air conditioning and refrigerants in general and how it's contributed to our current climate crisis. I feel like I have been reading a fair number of books urging major re-thinks lately, and it is worth the effort. In a time that seems ripe for change, it felt right to read After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort.

“Meticulously researched and engagingly written” (Amitav Ghosh), this “knockout debut” ( New York Journal of Books) offers a rare glimpse of environmental hope, suggesting that maybe the vast and terrifying problem of global warming is not beyond our grasp to face. Wilson is at heart an essayist, looking far and wide to tease out what particular forces in American culture-in capitalism, in systemic racism, in our values-combined to lead us into the Freon crisis and then out. As he traces the refrigerant’s life span from its invention in the 1920s-when it was hailed as a miracle of scientific progress-to efforts in the 1980s to ban the chemical (and the resulting political backlash), Wilson finds himself on a journey through the American heartland, trailing a man who buys up old tanks of Freon stockpiled in attics and basements to destroy what remains of the chemical before it can do further harm. In After Cooling, Eric Dean Wilson braids together air-conditioning history, climate science, road trips, and philosophy to tell the story of the birth, life, and afterlife of Freon, the refrigerant that ripped a hole larger than the continental United States in the ozone layer. This “ambitious delightful” ( The New York Times) work of literary nonfiction interweaves the science and history of the powerful refrigerant (and dangerous greenhouse gas) Freon with a haunting meditation on how to live meaningfully and morally in a rapidly heating world.

After Cooling by Eric Dean Wilson