When I received an email from Yale’s Office of Career Strategy about the upcoming Yale Cooling Conference, I knew I had to go. “Sustainable cooling could cut 2050 emissions by 64%,” the conference website asserted. Sixty-four percent! This sounded utterly implausible.
Cooling Conference. I envisioned a roomful of overheated corporate executives toddling about, sticking their faces into AC units, minifridges, and good old-fashioned buckets of ice water. It could just as well have been the Yale Cabbage Convention or the Cardboard Colloquium—the kind of thing where you’d think, I guess I could see how someone might care about that, but also, are you fucking kidding me?
And yet, here it was in my inbox. March 5, two weeks away.
I raised my eyebrows at my friend, Mandy, across the table.
“We have to go, right?”
She nodded. We signed up.
The two weeks before the conference passed quickly thanks to a flurry of midterms and a blizzard of actual snow. As I watched a city worker excavate his stuck snowplow truck with a shovel, I wondered if preparations for the Cooling Conference might have gone a tad overboard.
When the big day arrived, the snow had melted, and campus was shrouded in a thick mist. Mandy and I could only attend thirty-five minutes of the conference’s last event—the Innovation Showcase, where startups would pitch their products. Showing up so late and leaving so soon seemed a bit like being invited to dinner, arriving in time to wash the dishes, and departing as soon as you put soap on the sponge. Still, I was determined to make the most of it. A morning email with the conference agenda reignited my excitement.
“4:10 – 4:20: Special Announcement on Super Pollutants”
Shame I’d have to miss it for English class.
***
That evening, after a damp trek up Hillhouse Avenue, we arrived at the School of Management at 6:06 P.M.
My first priority was to get a lanyard. Fellow conference-goers will understand: if you don’t get the branded lanyard with the huge name card, did you even go? This was our shot at looking like Cool People.
The registration table was closed, so we inquired after our lanyards with the lithe, pink-jacketed woman running the event, Kathy.
“Ohhh, are you college students?” Kathy asked.
“Yes,” we replied, almost in unison.
“Are you here for the plenary?” Now we weren’t so sure. We exchanged glances.
“Y-yes,” I stammered.
“That ended at three.” More glances. “Are you here for the panel?” We glanced harder.
“Yeah-yep.” We feigned confidence.
“That ended at five.” Fuck. Why even ask? “Are you here for the showcase?”
“Yeah, yeah exactly,” I said. Mandy nodded.
“Oh great, that’s right now,” Kathy said. “You’re not gonna be staying for long, are you?”
“No,” I confirmed. I hesitated. “But can we get lanyards?”
Over at the defunct registration table, Kathy rooted through jumbled bins to find our name cards, which had disappeared. We settled for sticky name tags and a Sharpie, and returned to the semicircular showcase room, looking marginally less lost and substantially more stupid.
***
Along the curved glass wall, twenty or thirty representatives each stood in front of a TV displaying their pitch deck. Conference attendees schmoozed at cocktail tables and perused the startups on display.
I glanced at the TV nearest the door and read the words “German Military Containers”—yes, I thought, even German Military Containers must need AC in the summer—but I looked away just as the rep caught my eye. You have to talk to them, Alex. I steeled myself and turned to the next TV.
An open black storage case, several feet in length, sat conspicuously on the floor beneath the TV. Wires criss-crossed the inside and a hefty metal lever protruded. If this were Mission Impossible, that lever would set off a nuke. I looked up at the grey-bearded, suit-sporting, six-foot-something guy manning the station.
“Hey, could you, uh, tell us about what you got goin’ on here?” I asked.
“Sure. What are you here for?” he replied, sounding skeptical, and also Australian.
“We’re college students, just curious.” He seemed unconvinced, and justifiably so: I wasn’t particularly convinced of my own curiosity either.
But he continued with his spiel, i.e. a stream of incomprehensible jargon—something about batteries. I nodded vigorously and asked a bunch of questions. As he babbled on, I wondered at the absurdity of the moment. It was so artificial, so pointless, but it was also exactly what I had come for. I felt my mouth twitch. Don’t even think about laughing. No smiling either, goddammit!
He gestured at the not-actually-nuclear-bomb thing on the floor.“Would you like to see a demo?” Jackpot! Before we could even agree, he dropped to his knees, and after a beat, we joined him.
Now here we were, all three of us, squatting on the floor. A strange intimacy separated us from the buttoned up world a few feet above. At the Aussie’s request, Mandy and I pressed our fingers on the wires in the box, and as he moved the lever back and forth, the wires got hot, then cold, hot, then cold. The molecules in the metal were radiating and absorbing heat as they stretched and contracted, rearranging themselves into different structures.
“Wow, so cool!” I exclaimed. (It was legitimately cool.) We stayed on the floor chatting for a little longer, then stood, and the two of us thanked him for the conversation.
Our next target was Steven, a thirty-something man in a button-down with long curly hair. Steven, as it turned out, had graduated Yale (what college? No. Shut up.) in 2011, and he was excited to chat. (Fine, it was JE.)
I struggle to recall the name of his company. Fexkra Kreftad? Drafka Texfrat? Exfa Fratrek? Turns out it was Fexa Trakref. They make Lifecycle Refrigerant Management software.
Cooling machines, like refrigerators and AC units, use special gases called refrigerants, and these refrigerants are tightly regulated because if they get out, it’s bad news. If the refrigerant in your window AC unit leaks out—for example, as its internal tubing degrades over time—it’s about as bad for the climate as driving a pickup truck from Sweden to South Africa. (Seriously; I did the math.) Remember the hole in the ozone layer? Bad refrigerants. So, companies that use lots of refrigerant are legally obligated to limit leakage by keeping careful track of it. The refrigerant industry (which is a real thing) calls this Lifecycle Refrigerant Management.
Steven told us he’d majored in Political Science, and after graduating, he wanted to make the biggest possible impact on the world, so he decided to get into HVAC. Selling Lifecycle Refrigerant Management software seemed an unlikely candidate for “biggest possible impact on the world,” but the more I listened to Steven talk, the more I worried that he might have been onto something. I put the thought on hold.
Our third stop was Jack at the LuxWall booth. Jack had Big Midwestern Dad Energy, like Tim Walz (remember him?) if Tim Walz had gone into HVAC. If Jack was skeptical of our reasons for talking to him, he masked it with abundant enthusiasm for the sheet of glass on the table before him.
“See those little metal dots between the panes? Oh-point-two-five millimeters diameter. Like glitter when you see ‘em all in a bucket.” I peered at the glass and spotted the microscopic glitter bits spaced out in a nice, neat grid.
Channeling my Midwestern Son Energy, I identified that this window was a good insulator. A well-insulated building retains hot air when it’s cold and cool air when it’s hot, so it requires less energy to heat. Normal windows are poor insulators, so highly fenestrated buildings waste energy on heating and cooling. Jack’s ultra-insulating window could save a lot of energy. Oodles. Gobs.
“If you put this treatment on a window, you can take it from an R1 or an R2 to an R18, R19,” Jack boasted. Translation: your window small number. My window big number. Big number better than small number. My window better than your window.
“This stuff is gonna change the world,” he declared. It sounded grandiose, but as Mandy and I stepped away from the booth, we agreed that it was probably true. The worries that Steven had planted returned: what if the Cooling Conference wasn’t just a big joke, and my raw, shapeless desire to fight climate change would best be satisfied by managing refrigerants and selling R19 glass with glitter bits?
Before I could see where the thought would lead, a classmate of ours appeared.
“Heyyy, what’s poppin?” he asked.
“Isn’t this just the absolute best thing ever?” I gushed. Mandy echoed the sentiment.
“Uhhhhhh, like…it’s fine, like…” He smiled as if to suggest that I’d been joking. “Do you actually like this?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s awesome, pretty much the highlight of my week,” I said, earnestly.
“Ha ha, ha, yeah,” he offered, still not grasping the profound difference in our experiences. “Okay, well, uh, you guys, uh, have a nice time, see you later.”
***
Just as he left, Kathy, who’d given us our name tags, came over to check in. She smiled.
“I hahaha don’t want to embarrass you or anything, hahaha” she began. “I mean, I hesitate to even ask, but are you guys—how old are you? Twenty? Twenty-one?”
We nodded at the larger number.
“Cause if you’re over twenty-one”—she gestured at the bar behind us—“I can give you some drink tickets.” I can’t deny it: the prospect of talking about refrigerants and window insulation while shitfaced sounded glorious. But we politely declined.
***
Our fourth inquiry was brief. Max, the rep, couldn’t have been older than twenty-eight. He had his hand on the handle of…a cooler on wheels? Really?
“Wanna check out the cooler?” Max chirped. So it was a cooler. Like Jack, Steven, and the Aussie guy, Max clearly knew that we had no good reason to be there, but unlike the others, he didn’t seem to give a damn. He was almost too excited about the cooler. His face seemed to say, Look at this fuckin’ thing! Can you believe it? Jeez, me neither!
But this was not just your beers-for-the-barbecue type cooler. Nay, this was the Artyc Medstow 5L-Intercampus precision cold chain shipper.
“Like, think of a phlebotomist,” he offered. I was unable to do this.
Max explained: the phlebotomist—that’s the doctor who draws your blood—needs to move samples around the hospital while keeping them cold. The typical method these days is to wrap all such things—blood, medication, human organs—in bundles of dry ice. Yawn. Dry ice is so last year. Electric cooler, baby! Welcome to 2026.
A real Cooling Person joined the conversation and we took our leave. Eight minutes on the clock: time for one last chat.
***
The last TV on the perimeter seemed deserted. A shy, nerdy-looking guy loitered in the corner a few feet away, munching on half of a tiny burger.
We looked at the TV, then him, then the TV again. He sprung into action.
“Michael,” he said, through a mouthful of food. He extended his non-burger hand, and we exchanged greetings. Michael’s thing was a roof covering so white it radiated monstrous amounts of heat, the opposite of a black roof that becomes egg-fryingly hot on a sunny day. If you want to keep your warehouse or data center cool without spending a fortune on AC, it turns out that installing a shiny roof is a good strategy.
In the industry lingo, a shiny roof is an example of “passive cooling,” a cooling system that runs on zero energy. Like the rest of the Cooling Conference gadgets, it’s more important than it sounds.
Refrigeration and air conditioning account for a staggering ten percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. A third of that is leaking refrigerants, and the other two-thirds is from electricity use. As far as climate change goes, cooling creates a nasty cycle. As the Earth gets hotter, we’ll need more cooling in order to keep people and crops healthy—but the more cooling we use, the more the Earth heats up. The world’s poorest regions, which experience some of the most severe heat effects, have the least access to vital cooling.
A 2025 report from the United Nations Environment Programme’s “Cool Coalition” lays out the scope of the problem and a plan to solve it. Shiny roofs, insulated windows, and refrigerant management all appear in the document. The proposed solutions, if implemented, would bring about that sixty-four percent reduction in emissions due to cooling, or a six percent reduction in global emissions. Tens of trillions of dollars could be saved.
Cast in this light, the people at the Cooling Conference look positively heroic.
***
Before we departed, Michael asked us about our post-grad plans. We mumbled and shrugged. I asked how he’d enjoyed his career.
“You know,” he paused. “I thought it would be a little easier, and that I’d be a little richer.”
Saving the world—it’s hard work! Doesn’t pay great.
I grabbed two crackers from the cheese platter at the bar—one for each of us—and we headed for the exit. As I opened the door, Mandy and I shared a knowing look. Cooling, as a career, had previously been more of a punchline than a real possibility. But now, standing on the threshold, it seemed almost like our duty.
We let the door close behind us, and proceeded into the foggy night.
