i see theres actually discourse on this. Lemme lay it out then.

Yes your all right AC use can be mitigated by proper building techniques. it does cause lots of emissions. its also necessary for many people and places regardless. Its also way over used in western society.

None of that matters. The specifics of when to use or not use AC arent relevant right now because under capitalism your never gonna get houses built better en masse, and the only thing thats gonna be considered is how can we build houses even cheaper to make more profit and sell more AC units?

This is a discussion we can have all day and its never gonna matter.

The only thing worth discussing here is the fact that currently the powers that be want to sell you a home that needs AC and has AC and then shame you for using the damn thing.

“Hey poors, suffer a little harder while your disruptive innovative vampire masters take a private jet to and from their McMansion to indulge their micromanagement hobby every fucking day.”

If you could get enough Americans to stop using air conditioning to make a difference, you might as well harness your incredibly powerful social movement to skip ahead and build a global electricity grid with enough solar to power AC for all

You all know that air conditioning is a crucial accessibility issue, right? Many chronic illnesses/disabilities cause heat intolerance. While we should be working on finding greener solutions, telling people to cut out air conditioning from their lives can slide into ableist territory real fast.

Anyone who thinks that air conditioning is a “luxury” is forgetting that high temperatures literally kill people. The idea that hundreds of millions of people in the Global South do not have access to adequate cooling does not mean that air conditioning is a bourgeois luxury, it’s a health hazard and an indication of the disproportionate burden of the effects of climate change. This is why China builds power generators for Global South countries. Also summer temperatures across the world regularly rise above 100 F in many places, I’d like you all to tell my grandparents in Wuhan that they’re killing the planet by having air conditioning on.

I refuse to believe people can keep writing and believe this fucking stupid blame shifting shit. Every fucking time things get worse the bottom rung is encouraged to tighten their belts while major corporate polluters and energy hogs go unregulated.

What would be good for the environment? The author is almost there. We need to spend more time outside (building scaffolds)

We get brownouts and blackouts during summer when the strain on the grid is too much, when fire cuts off power, and our power stations conk out. AC cannot be relied upon, and increasingly so as demand increases and infrastructure worsens. So learning to live without it is an unfortunate reality. Anyone presenting adaptation as a solution and not a necessity is completely off base, however.

Edit: fwiw I don’t have ac, I just sweat for six months of the year

How long before liberals blame me and my central AC for all climate change?

You do not develop an immunity to heat exhaustion or heat stroke.

this is particularly ghoulish as someone who is living in an area that used to not need AC as much in the summer. As areas have gotten much, much hotter than they should be, the idea of not having AC is quickly becoming a nightmare. The only time it would be remotely acceptable to make someone go without cooling here is during the winter and even then it’s more like a cool autumn day than winter should be like. It’s so hot out right now and it’s the beginning of fall. I genuinely don’t believe we’re only seeing 1-2 degrees Celsius of heat increase, the climate here is genuinely shifting towards more tropical temps gradually. Actually if we want humans to survive the next 100 years we should probably shift the majority of our electricity production towards powering AC units and making more efficient forms of it.

A comment from the article:

It is very fashionable from folks in northern climates who routinely heat their homes in the winter to look down on those in those in southern climates that cool their homes in summer. Extreme heat and cold both kill. HVAC systems, heating and cooling, are both used to prevent this and to give comfort. Cooling your house on a 95 degree day to 75 degrees is a 20 degree move. In the north, when it is 30 degrees out, many heat their homes to 65 or 70 degrees, a 35 or 40 degree difference. Asking people to only heat to 50 degrees would be an outrage. Why? Well, because they are not comfortable at that temperature. For some reason using electricity to heat to comfort is considered necessary, but using electricity to cool is wasteful and ruining the climate. I am sure it has nothing to do with a greater percentage of wealthy caucasians living in colder climates and more less wealthy, non-caucasians living in hot climates.

https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/41i6a3

A Japanese commenter’s opinion:

So it is easy for the author to recommend this living in Kansas where I assume there is ample temperature fluctuation (ie. low-mid humidity) to allow evaporative cooling afforded by misting and fans. I am currently in Western Japan. Early morning temperature here is 80F with 80% humidity. Max temp tomorrow will be 93F with 75% humidity. Spending “more time outside” is literally a recipe for heat stroke. While the sentiment is noble to reduce air conditioner use, it really IS a location-dependent option.

https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/41i705

imagine if housing developers in the US gave a fuck about literally anything. like if homes weren’t made out of toothpicks and papier mache, and the mold that grows above 65% RH and temps over 85° couldn’t literally eat the structure. or housing developments had to use landscaping strategies and ground coupled heat exchangers. and windcatchers, attic fans, whole house ventilation systems. like if somebody had to do a hardcore climate audit of the location and site/orient/build all of the housing, landscaping and infrastructure to maximize its resilience to extreme temperature swings and optimize comfort.

and if everybody who, like the author, was born in the malarial deep south could get a phd and relocate to bucolic, quiet place like a micropolitan college town/federal experiment station in kansas and have the funds to buy their own home and make all the passive climate moderation and control investments because of course all the contractors, materials, and logistical capacity necessary to do that kind of work are there.

what a fuckin world if the people with all the power and wealth were more interested in using it to build a future than to short flip a return right now.

I mean, if you live in Maine… you probably don’t need AC.

If you live in phoenix… you probably do. (I would argue phoenix should probably be depopulated to the point where its groundwater resources can actually support the city, and the remaining population given heat-adapted housing instead of just the same stick-frame houses and double wides as the rest of the US, but whatever)

The heat-adapted housing thing is a real factor though. recently-built houses rely hugely on modern insulation technologies, and forego simple, effective adaptations like awnings, porches, blinds, etc. Still, at the high end, they are at least usually well insulated.

Apartment buildings can be a real mess though. I’ve lived in an apartment that was 100+ years old and brick and stayed comfortable with basically just fans, and I’ve lived in a 60s/70s building that is just hot in the summer no matter what I do. (poorly insulated ceiling/roof I think?). A cousin of mine worked maintenance in a luxury high rise and it was somehow even worse, since the windows don’t open above a certain story and the heat (and maybe AC?) was centralized and non-zonal, the south side would be a furnace while the north side was cold.

It’d still be 100% feasible to live without AC here but I’m not in the south.

We should be decreasing reliance on AC not increasing it, in terms of building design, but individual consumers… tougher nut to crack

Yeah OK I can’t afford or legally do extensive changes to my apartment

I absolutely would do passive cooling if I could but the building is literally not designed for that if I turn off the air other apartments pump heat into mine

Also I know people that have died from heat stroke here from being outside for longer than an hour

So I agree with many of you that we should reduce our reliance on AC for cooling through passive cooling methods, but it really isn’t that easy. Where I live it can be 30-35 plus humidity (so 40-45 in the summer) which is hot enough to kill the vulnerable, and due to the high humidity, makes many passive cooling options not work all that great. Especially when it doesn’t cool down at night anymore (thanks Obama).

Then, in the winter it’s regularly -10, to -20. So some passive cooling no longer works to your benefit.

Realistically there needs to be design considerations for each building, as well as the design of cities/towns/etc., that minimizes all kinds of consumption by leveraging the local climate, geography, flora, as well as transportation related consumption (i.e. use ideas like 5 minute cities to make living less consumptive and car optional).

But none of these things will realistically happen on any meaningful scale until the profit motive is removed from the real estate industry.