Time’s Joe Klein hates air-conditioning and thinks you should, too.

I will confess a bias here. I love warm weather, even when it slouches toward humidity. I detest the harsh, slightly metallic quality of the air forced through even the fanciest AC systems. The only air conditioner I own sits, unused, in my car; my home is happily unrefrigerated. But given the energy mess we’re in, I can now gild my personal preference with a patina of high-mindedness: air-conditioning is bad for the planet, and for national security, and for our balance-of-payments deficit. Unfortunately, it is not as bad as I’d like it to be — in part because not all of our electricity is provided by fossil fuels (although coal does predominate). And also because air-conditioning represents a relatively small slice of our energy use, an estimated 4%.

But that’s still pretty egregious. We used an estimated 4 quadrillion British thermal units on air-conditioning in 2006, which is more than the total energy usage of all but 21 countries. And a fair amount of that is peak usage — the sort that sends the electric grid crackling toward brownouts and meltdowns and increases the demand for the construction of more electric power plants (and the pollution they spew — unless they use renewable sources like hydropower or, as John McCain correctly insists, nuclear power, which should be carefully reconsidered).

“A lot of utilities supplement their main power sources with quick-acting oil- or gas-driven generators on the hottest days of the year,” says Lee Schipper of the University of California, Berkeley. Schipper estimates the cost of peak usage is 20 cents per kW-h, as opposed to an average of 13 cents for “baseload capacity” usage, and it is far more carbon-intense because it is generated by oil or gas.

So little time, so much meddling to get done.