Climate Nuts Want You to Set Your Thermostat to 82 at Night

CLAY: I saw this headline, and I thought I’ve gotta get your opinion on this. So this has been out there for a little while, but it’s bouncing around on the internet right now. In order to protect against “climate disaster” there is a suggestion that you should set your thermostat to 82 degrees every night. I cannot even imagine. I can imagine, actually, because when I lived in the Caribbean I lived in one house, Buck, that did not have air-conditioning.

Sleeping at night with just a fan was incredibly difficult, and I understand some of you out there are older. My parents didn’t have air conditioning when they grew up in the South and they talked about how incredibly hot it was, and you’d just wake up sweating through all your sheets and everything else. That is an awful way to wake up. That was commonplace for people. Like you — a softer generation — can you imagine 82 degrees?

BUCK: At 82 degrees? You know, there’s like Bikram yoga or hot yoga?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: This is like hot sleeping. Like, there’s no way that 82 degrees is… Okay, Producer Ali actually knows about this stuff. How hot…? It’s like a hundred degrees in there, right, in the…? Oh, more. She’s saying more. Okay. So I’ll make you… I’m a big wimp, 82 degrees, whatever. The point is, it’s really hot at 82 degrees. The thermostat gets above 73, and I start to get a little sweaty.

I’m just saying, it needs to be, for optimum sleeping temperature — and of course the men and women in the audience are gonna have… Oh! The gender binary is real, by the way, because men tend to tolerate colder temperatures. We have more body fat or whatever. I don’t know. We just can handle colder temperature more. But really it should be 68 to 69 degrees for optimal sleeping, maybe even go down to 67. That gets a little chilly. Anything above 72, it’s just uncivilized. Just hard to sleep.

CLAY: And they want you to leave your house set at 78 during the day. So you and I are not people who sit around us and worry about global warming and climate change and what it’s gonna do to the planet.

BUCK: Zero. Zero worry about.

CLAY: You and I spend zero time worrying about it at all. I’m the same way, and similarly, I can’t think of anything in terms of a comfort level in the house, 82 degrees is pretty hot.

BUCK: By the way, no one is going to do this who is pushing it, but there are some people who’ll be like, “I want to save the planet,” and they’re actually gonna be sitting there just dripping, dripping with sweat all night and eventually they’ll realize, it’s not a good idea.