It’s sometimes easier to heat things up than it is to cool things down.

See. I figured out why I prefer the winter to the summer. As I sit here writing this the outside temperature is climbing into the thirty Celcius range and simply existing outdoors is legitimately uncomfortable. Living in Canada I get to experience both ends of the thermometer, and six months from now I’ll no doubt be lightheartedly complaining that there is ice on the windows and how cold it is outside. In fact, I was sitting in this exact seat in this same cafe on the coldest day in January of this year when the glass a foot away from me layered in a thick coat of frost seemed to be slurping the heat right through my sweater and leaching the warmth out of my skin. 

Yet, in this heat I am reminded that we seem to have many more options to warm ourselves up than we do to cool ourselves down.

In the winter I can turn up the heat, put on a sweater, bundle up on the couch with a blanket and watch television, tug a toque down over my ears, or even go for a run and work up a warm sweat.

In the summer we crank the air conditioning, turn on the fans, splash ourselves with cool water, eat a lot of ice cream and run from puddle of shade to puddle of shade—but at the end of the day it just seems more difficult to maintain that thing we call comfortable.

In the last week we’ve not only been thinking about turning down the air temperature, but we’ve been hearing a lot about turning down the political heat, too.  I think the same sort of axiom applies: it’s sometimes easier to heat things up than it is to cool things down. 

Not that we can’t do both.

Heck, we’re a fairly advanced technological civilization that has stepped foot on the moon: heating and cooling technology should be a piece of cake, right? It doesn’t change the basic fact, though, that pulling energy out of any system—the air or politics—is just plain trickier than putting more energy into it.