Posted on 06/24/2015 7:03:30 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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 multi-billion-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 startup 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 multi-million-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.
— Michelle Malkin is author of the new book Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs.
As a Catholic, with all due respect, the Vatican is full of crap these days.
BOOM goes the dynamite. Just ask the suffering people in Pakistan if they’d like to have air conditioning right now.
The current occupant of the throne of Peter is a marxist who occasionally remembers to say something that sounds like Catholic doctrine.
Because it gets hot in Rome?
Because it gets hot in Rome?
I get an envelope every month labeled “To Defray Heating and Air Conditioning Costs”. From now on I am going to fill it with a copy of that passage from the encyclical.
“As a Catholic, with all due respect, the Vatican is full of crap these days.”
As a Catholic with minimum respect, they are followed closely by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
All libs and Leftists I agree.
So sick of it.
Wish the Church would get out of politics entirely and focus on what it is supposed to be doing.
I don’t even care any more if the Church’s tax exempt status is ever revoked.
LOL! Likely Catholic Churches around the country are going to get their fill of this type of rebellion. I sure hope so. The Pope really blew it.
In reading the encyclical and listening to the Popes comments, it strikes me that the 1 organization he has NOT criticized is GOVERNMENT. Considering that governments are the ones who wage war, have the most weapons, kill, imprison and oppress the most people, etc., you would think he might have something to say. Instead he focuses on capitalists and free market systems.
Bump
Not even the soft-core squishy Liberalism I’ve come to expect in Church doctrine. This thing is hard-core OWS.
There are rules Michelle. When the pope say something completely ridiculous, he’s been misquoted or mistranslated.
When he says something reasonable, it stands as is.
It’s really quite a phenomenon!
Governments are also the ones who ratchet up the cost of doing business and creating rules and regs which stifle, not promote, invention.
With people suffering and dying the(normal )heat wave in India and Pakistan crying out for their governments to do something about the blackouts caused by inefficient (fossil fueled)electrical power supply, the Vatican sits in air conditioned comfort and “pontificates” about the evils of carbon based modern society made easier by fossil fuels.
Hypocrites all!
Look at what our elites have in store for us “commoners”
“You think civilization is some horrible, polluting human invention that separates us from the state of nature. But civilization doesn’t separate us from nature, Ted. Civilization protects us from nature”
~STATE of FEAR (Crichton)
I have a relative who works for a Catholic organization staffed and owned by a religious group.
He cares for these old guys and likes their purpose and mission. He also tells me these learned men are the most disorganized, unrealistic, and in their own way, overbearing and entitled people he has ever worked with. That is saying a lot given his field and the breadth of his acquaintance.
He heads their profit center and spends hours trying to explain to these double docs the basics of profit and loss. It is a no win situation.
An example is how the head of the organization schedles several 200 to 300 people meetings, back to back. When my brother points out that staff has to have time to shift things and have breaks, there is little understanding. The practical stuff just doesn’t figure in.
So these days my relative will sit in planning meetings and when more impossible scheduling is discusses, he will point to the glitch and say, So, here, Father So and So, is when you come out of your office and perform the miracle of setting up the next function on the other side of the camupus in 5 minutes? And providing six more staff? Great!
The Pope should declare all the recent deaths in the recent Indian heat wave to be martyrs for climate change
As a practicing Roman Catholic I feel I need to remind everyone that this institution has had all kinds of bad popes and when they forget the admonition “My Kingdom Is Not Of This World” .This church gets into all sorts of trouble. But survives.
These meandering homilys of This pope on temporal matters diffuse any theologic message Pope Francis offers. Snowballs should be thrown at those pointy hat supporters of his as well as opposition clearly expressed to those meanderings on any visit Francis may make here.
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