In 1999, government workers in Mexico took their last officially sanctioned siesta. Until then, it was normal for clerks and bureaucrats to take two- or three-hour breaks in the middle of the workday. Many of them went home for lunch, took a nap, then returned to their offices, working into the evening to make up for lost time. The siesta used to be commonplace in Spanish-speaking countries, but the tradition was already waning as Latin America’s economies developed throughout the ’80s and ’90s. As companies and governments modernized, they adopted the same schedules as their counterparts in other countries. Mexico failed to properly anticipate the effect this would have on energy consumption.

By shifting work from the sweltering afternoon into cooler evening hours, the siesta provided a kind of de facto air-conditioning, says Elizabeth Shove, a professor of sociology at Lancaster University in England. Getting rid of siestas makes people more dependent, during the hottest part of the day, on energy-intensive forms of cooling. Air-conditioning use in Mexico has skyrocketed since the siesta ban. In 1995, 10 percent of Mexican homes had A.C. By 2011, that figure had grown to 80 percent.

Shove studies the cultural and historical factors underlying sustainable living. Historically, she says, societies developed methods of dealing with their local climates, and those tools and behaviors became ingrained cultural customs. As the world becomes more interconnected, these customs are changing, and so is the definition of something as elemental as comfort.

That’s right: there is no universal definition of comfort, especially as it relates to temperature. Both Shove and Susan Mazur-Stommen, of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, told me two decades’ worth of research data clearly demonstrate that different people experience the same temperature differently. People report being comfortable all over the thermostat, from 43 degrees Fahrenheit all the way up to 86.