You know those irritating people who like to announce that they don’t watch TV as if it’s a mark of cultural superiority? I’m afraid that I’m one of them, except my snobbery involves air conditioning.

“Air conditioning?” I’ll ask with a wry smile, amused at the presumption. “We don’t have that in our house. This is New Hampshire, after all.”

I say this even when sweating like a pig because it’s 90 degrees and 90% humidity in the climate-changed Granite State.

Part of my glib self-congratulation comes from the idea that air conditioning is a climate super-villain. By avoiding it I think that I am, as the pundits like to say, helping save the planet.

But I’ve come to realize that this is wrong and I’ve got to stop patting myself on the back. I do more planetary damage with the heating system that we all regard as a basic requirement of life.

It’s simple physics. It takes more energy to warm my house 35 degrees (from 30 to 65 on a typical winter day) than cool it by 25 degrees (from 95 to 70 on an increasingly typical summer day). My eco-conscious self would never scold a neighbor for burning oil to to heat their home, but I’ll give them the side-eye for using electricity to cool it.

The heat/cold discrepancy is even greater than the basic calculation indicates because doing work by burning something is less efficient than doing work by using electricity (yes, even if electricity is made by burning something).

I think this unbalanced point of view exists because air conditioning is relatively new. Humans have heated their homes since our homes were caves but we’ve only cooled them for a couple of generations, so we’re quicker to blame climate change on cooling than on heating. We need to stop this and to realize that as the planet heats up, air conditioning is becoming the necessity that home heating has always been. According to a 2012 study in the Journal of Political Economy, air conditioning has cut heat deaths in the U.S. by around 80% since 1960.

One benefit would be to not just cool with electricity but also heat with it. Old-timers shocked by the high cost of resistance heating in their youth think that idea is crazy, but heat pumps, which are so efficient they seem almost magic, make it financially as well as ecologically sensible.

My wife and I are belatedly in the process of putting minisplits on our house before our aged oil furnace kicks the bucket. This will greatly improve our wintertime carbon footprint, but that’s not all.

Once they are up and running, we will have air conditioning for the first time, since the miracle of the technology is that they both heat and cool. They pump heat from indoors to outdoors in the summer and pump it from outdoors to indoors in winter.

This will mean, however, that I can’t be an air-conditioning snob any more. No longer will I be able to peer down my nose with superiority when the subject of home cooling arises. Soon I will be just another one of the huddled masses living in artificial chill. It’s going to be a real loss.

Fortunately, I can always fall back on not watching TV. Because I don’t watch TV — did I mention that?