Comment by setgree
12 hours ago
We are indeed living in more comfortable homes. Americans are migrating to the sunbelt because of ample AC in the summer and the winters are pleasant. that’s a big part of why we have many fewer heat deaths per capita than Europe: https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/2025/08/02/opinion-us-heat-...
You don’t realize how nice it is to live and work in air conditioned spaces until visiting a part of Europe where AC is viewed with disdain for reasons I still don’t understand.
Also the move to electric heat pumps is increasing electricity rates but reducing natural gas usage and improving overall efficient.
The GP comment was trying to do snarky doomerism but accidentally hit upon a lot of truths. It’s amazing how many things are getting better but some people are hell bent on being cynical about it anyway.
I’m not from Europe but those sentiments I think are changing with the recent intensity and frequency of heat waves.
> You don’t realize how nice it is to live and work in air conditioned spaces until visiting a part of Europe where AC is viewed with disdain for reasons I still don’t understand.
Most of Europe is poor. AC is expensive. It's actually that simple.
There's AC in Switzerland.
> There's AC in Switzerland.
Not at all, it has one of the lowest rate in Europe along with the UK. It's very hard to get the building permit required to install one. Portable AC has had a boom those past few years though (because it doesn't require a permit).
I have lived and worked in Switzerland. My office (shared with 2 other people) was the only space in the entire floor with AC due to some obscure archaic reason.
That air conditioning worked great for years, but a few months before I left that position, the facilities management people suddenly came in and ripped it out. No justification given.
Thank God TPTB didn't notice I had AC for all those years; it really would have been miserable without it. But despite the misery I noted all around me, there was an extremely strong disdain for air conditioning that permeated the culture. When I talked to friends and colleagues about the AC situation I was regularly ribbed for being a gluttonous American wasting electricity on such a triviality. They were legitimately proud to suffer. Baffling.
I've come to the conclusion that most Western and Central Europeans--yes, including Swiss--have a masochistic superiority complex around AC. They see suffering without AC as core to the European identity and sweating it out in unproductive misery (or taking a whole month off of work) as virtuous. They willingly kill thousands of people and leave hundreds of millions more in misery every year simply to feel superior and European.
Europe is so backwards when it comes to annual heat deaths that they manage to have more heat deaths per year than the US has gun deaths + heat deaths combined. You won't hear about that from Europeans though, it'd make them seem barbaric. 175,000 heat deaths per year in Europe according to the WHO. It's a staggering genocide of technological primitiveness. Imagine having millions of people die because you can't be bothered to adopt 1950s technology (and of course I'm aware of the things the US is backwards on).
I think it is simply because in most of Europe air conditioning is unnecessary for comfort 95% of the year. Here in San Francisco most homes don't have air conditioning either, but there might be a week or two where it gets very hot and we just put up with the barbaric technological primitiveness.
Much of the US is extremely unpleasant without air-conditioning for a substantial portion of the year so of course everyone living in those parts installs it.
Yes in many parts of the US it's not just the heat but the humidity. One summer I tried going without AC as much as possible to see how much it would change my electric bill. I could handle the temperature most of the time but the humidity especially at night started giving me mold problems in the house. Cleaned that up and went back to using the AC and no more mold. Not sure how people controlled this back in the pre-AC days, maybe just a lot more cleaning.
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You sent me to the books because this is such a fascinating stat. It's true! Heat deaths in the US: 5 per million people. Italy: 500+ per million people. I had no idea.
Figures based on coroners reports are somewhat suspect.
> In September 2022, a vicious heat wave enveloped much of the western U.S., placing tens of millions of people under heat advisories. Temperatures across California soared into the triple digits. Sacramento broke its heat record by more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit when the temperature hit 116 degrees.
> California death certificates showed that 20 people died as a result of heat-related illness from Aug. 31, 2022 to Sept. 9, 2022.
> But a study last year by California’s Department of Public Health found that death rates increased by about 5 percent statewide during the heat wave, causing 395 additional deaths.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-deaths-from-h...
Excess mortality studies seem to show about 24 per 100,000 excess deaths from heat in Europe vs 6 in US/Canada.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34245712/
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I do think we'll need to change our view on airconditioning, every home should have airconditioning just like it has heating.
But I'm very sceptical of those numbers. They are apparently even worse for cold, and you can't attribute that to lack of airconditioning. I still think the huge difference can only be attributed to a difference in reporting.
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The temperature a few metres below ground level is consistently cool (approx. 15 celcius) year round.
Could this be made the basis of an efficient cooling system?
It's not as simple as it might seem at first glance. People often go into their basement and think "wow, it's cool down here. If only I could make my house this cool." But, as soon as you moved the air from your basement to your house, the air in your basement would be replaced by ambient air and would take time to be cooled by the Earth. And so you quickly realize you need a lot of thermal mass and an efficient way to move heat in order to keep up with removing the heat from your house.
Yes, but it needs to work both ways. Heat needs to be extracted during the winter. Otherwise the ground would just be heated up to much. That is what a ground source heat pump does.
It's not so easy in dense urban environments where power cables are buried, along with ancient sewer systems, subways/metros, etc.
You are starting to see a lot more external AC (heat pump?) units jerry-rigged into the sides of multi-unit dwellings, though.
I think there wasn't a culture of buying ACs, because in most of Europe the climate was much more moderate. The summers are much hotter now than when I was a kid and heat waves are more regular. Many more people are buying air conditioning now.
Much of the US already had warmer summers than Europe when the impact of climate change was smaller, so AC is far more common.
Can their pension system afford A/C?