Permafrost nostalgia

Heated dome of an office building in Barcelona.Ferran Mateo

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• Permafrost: Siberia's "Eternal Frozen Ground" Melts

Prometheus gave the humans the fire — the cornerstone of our civilization — but what deified us was the air conditioning. After an engineer managed to regulate temperature and humidity for the first time in a Brooklyn printing house in 1902, he moved from industry and public spaces to private spaces, transforming the way people travel, socialize and consume. Urban developers also embraced the invention: they erected glass-enclosed skyscrapers and colonized hot regions without having to prioritize thermal efficiency, much to the delight of power companies. That was progress, that's how it was exported. But this happy story was clouded in the 1970s, when the relationship between refrigerant gases and the destruction of the ozone layer was discovered. It was a paradox:technology that created heated islands for the comfort of a fraction of the population favored global warming. According to estimates, by 2050, in parallel with the increase in income

per capita in developing countries and the most populated economies, global electricity consumption for mechanical refrigeration will skyrocket. In

(1999) Sloterdijk said: "what, for now, is still common to all the inhabitants of the Earth is the mobile climate envelope of the planet", but who can "strives to get away from the bad air shared by all" . We receive an environmental inheritance that we are going to leave further diminished, with no signs that this vicious (and flawed) cycle is going to stop. Thus we have arrived at the Pirocene, a time of devastating fires caused by increasingly extreme weather conditions.

Faced with climate change, the attitude has been the most humane: leave it for another day, when not to make the problem invisible together with those who suffer the worst consequences, even without being responsible, as in the Sahel. While today the map of inequality is colored in red and blue, some think: What difference does it make if the global temperature rises one and a half degrees, if at home or in the car I can lower it with a button? Progress has to go through changing that isolationist mentality symbolized by an air conditioner that allows us to contemplate on the screen, at a comfortable 22ºC, how a Greek island burns or the Siberian permafrost melts. Four centuries ago the poet John Donne already gave the key: nobody is an island; so don't ask for whom the bell tolls; double for you.