Saying it's no problem to increase energy use 10x as long as something else uses more is not really a compelling argument. Especially when there are decent replacements to save the 10x item.
If I made a 10x less energy use AC I'd be a billionaire; comparing to one of the most costly energy uses that has no simple replacement is not a good metric.
You still have to consider what is worth optimizing and what is not. Getting your task done because of a superior search engine also saves total energy spent on getting that task done.
If AC did not exist and I invented it, I would also be a billionaire, energy consumption would go up, and the net effect for society would be positive. Energy consumption going up has always been a sign of improvement in human wellbeing. Why would the future be any different?
I doubt air conditioning is as used as internet search engines. The only places where I ever saw air climatisation is cars and business buildings. I never saw one in a personal home, let alone a personal device carried in the pocket you can use while walking.
You really need to broaden your horizons while you still have the chance. This is like believing that boats don't exist because you live inland and have never seen a boat. Hundreds of millions of people are dependent on air conditioning in their homes.
I never said that boats or AC don't exist. Both exist, and I did saw and experimented many of them in commercial context. But not everyone can afford them plus the cost to operate them.
Sure I should broaden my horizon and even consider to look people enjoying their private jets and some helicopters. But a mere wage slave like myself will never have the chance to afford one, that's for sure.
Now let's consider back in initial context: mere mortals around me are definitely all using internet as soon as there parents will let them do so, and even a homeless person can afford a first price mobile access (2€/months) with a phone they can receive for nothing in some charity organizations like Emmaus. So affordability of access to online search is definitely several order below AC.
Dependent means it would not be physically possible to live in an area if it did not have air conditioning. For example, you would die very quickly in Phoenix, Arizona if you did not have air conditioning. It is not physically possible to live in 50°C heat for any extended period. Most of the southern portion of the USA was only sparsely settled until the invention and deployment of air conditioning. Krugman is on it.
The reason the city is called Phoenix in the first place is that it’s built on top of a much older community. People have lived (and kept cool!) in that area for thousands of years, although never with the current level of population density, of course.
Air conditioning is not an extravagant luxury, although I know many people who live in cold countries believe so. That's why I'm asking you to broaden your horizons. You don't consider indoor heating or plumbing a luxury to be comparable to a private jet?
In hot and humid places, having AC was always a priority a hundred steps above having internet access, until cheap smart phones arrived.
And they use a lot of energy, just like heating uses a lot of energy in colder climates.
Well, indoor heating is clearly more and more becoming a luxury on the affordability side, enough so that putting a jacket inside is my first go to option when I'm alone at home as I work remotely. But not yet so excited expensive as to private my children from its been benefits when they come back home. And of course nothing like a jet, indeed.
Plumbing is generally not also considered a luxury over here. But at mankind level, I do feel particularly privileged on this regard. I remain amazed we have water flowing at will, and even possibility to take hot shower every day. This is not a jet level kind of privilege, but I try to keep myself aware of how incredibly lucky I am to be able to benefit of such a technology and infrastructure.
I doubt humans waited AC to come alive for settling hot and humid areas. There are other ways to have cooled down residences which don't require so much sophistication in physic models before you can even dream to build a prototype.
All that said, I got your hint to document more on how/why AC is so much more used in some area, and I'm just starting my journey on learning about it.
I still doubt that local climate alone explain the difference in term of how common it is in different region of the world. For example USA have a very large set of different local climate, but from what I understand most homes have AC.
In Croatia more than 55% of households have AC installed, and only 10 years ago it was less than 25% of households. It got more popular as our summers are getting increasingly more hot and humid. Average salaries in France are probably double compared to Croatia. It definitely can't be classified as luxury if more than half of the country can afford it, in one of the poorer EU member states. I assume in the next 10 years it's probably gonna be 70+% of all households.
Regarding technical sophistication, AC is more or less using the same technology as a fridge, just scaled and adapted for room cooling instead of food storage.
I would say that there are no other way besides AC to cool down residences. Only building something akin to a palace with thick stone walls. But naturally, everybody cannot live in a palace. What people did before AC was invented, is to go to the river for a bath to cool down. And if you are unfortunate to not have AC in a place were you'd need it, you'll have to take a lot of showers, and drink a lot of cold water (but fridges are AC technology).
But I don't think anybody should consider themselves lucky to have AC or heating or plumbing. We're in the 21st century, these should be granted. We've moved beyond the phase of bare survival.
If you consider Northern European countries, human survival would have been near impossible there without artificial heating in the form of fire. You could say that thick fur clothes and a protein and fat heavy diet is enough, but you still need to dry your clothes somehow if it's been pouring 0 degree rain for a month straight. On the other hand, eskimos seem to have found a better technique, but I think their advantage is that they live so far North that they don't have to worry about cold rain: https://time.com/archive/6798620/science-the-cozy-eskimo/
The cool thing (hehe) with AC that few people think about is that it actually conditions the air. It's not just an air cooler, but more importantly it removes air humidity. Humidity is much more important than temperature. For example, a day with 32℃ temperature and 45% humidity will not feel too hot. You can sit in the shadow and be comfortable. But a day with 27℃ temperature and 80% humidity will be suffocatingly hot. I'm not sure why, I think it has to do with how we sweat. Or maybe that heat is conducted from the air to our bodies more efficiently in higher humidity.
If you have any suggestion for a cheaper solution than AC for keeping cool at home, I would be happy to hear. The noise of the machine can be annoying at night.
I'd like to give you a tip for reducing your heating bill there in France: Electric bed sheet/blanket. I have been using these for a decade now (where I live it gets both hot and cold). They keep you warm and comfortable all night and they use almost no electricity. I even believe they are beneficial for your health, but I cannot prove that. Been telling my European friends for years to get them, but there is great resistance. From HowStuffWorks:
"The consumption of energy depends on its wattage, typically between 15 to 115 watts. If you're based in the U.S., you might be charged around 13 cents per kWh. So, if your electric blanket consumes 100 watts and you use it for 10 hours a day, that will cost about 13 cents."
>But I don't think anybody should consider themselves lucky to have AC or heating or plumbing. We're in the 21st century, these should be granted. We've moved beyond the phase of bare survival.
I don't know what you mean with "must feel lucky" here, but on my side I do feel very privileged to live with access to these technologies. Yes, there are accessible at large scale without much people needing to struggle to obtain it, but this is not really a reason to not feel deeply grateful each time we are given the opportunity to enjoy them.
This week in Spain terrible floods ruined life of many people. While there is no doubt that many other things are coming to them as awful consequences, there is little doubt that not being able to enjoy these commodities makes it even harder.
If humanity could achieve worldwide dynamics for a few centuries without starvation at scale, genocide, large scale catastrophe significantly induced by insane urbanistic choices through careless or corrupted decision processes, and of course war, then maybe could take factually say that we "moved beyond the phase of bare survival" is a general baseline that can be taken for granted, rather than the brittle situation in which the most lucky people live in.
Regarding electric blanket, I don't see the point. During night, I generally sleep nude, and without heating the bedroom. As pointed by the reference you gave on Eskimos, keeping the body generated heat is generally more than enough to be confortable. Heating a room is only something that provides the sweet pleasure of being confortable without a jacket while moving around within the house.
Do some research on the American south. It's hot and humid half a year+. The only reason it's so populated is AC. I'd bet there are more houses with central AC in France than there are without AC in the southern US states.
The way temperatures have been changing in Europe in the past decade, you may not have A/C at home now, but I bet you'll have it in ten years, tops. So will everyone else and their dogs.
Yes we have pick heat waves. But that didn't make magically expand incomes that can be dropped in AC installation and operational costs.
As I said, in building that are attached to money incomes, be it hostels, shops or restaurants, it's of course something that can balanced within loses and profits. In a personal home, it will be just eat some of your budget.
And with electricity price on the rise (and thus basically everything in common goods) and salary stagnation on the other hand, I doubt people here will suddenly rush on AC on massive scales. Plus government apparently are pushing to alternative approach, but I'm just discovering that as this thread launched me on the track to investigate the topic.
Personally, I doubt I'll jump to some AC anytime soon. It's just out of reach for my incomes, all the more when there is no basically no chance to see the electricity price plummet while my salary has good chances to continue to stay freezed as it's been for the two last years. And it's not like I feel the most unlucky person in the town, to be clear, my situation is far from the worst ones I can witness around me.
Where I live (Poland), A/C is expensive too, though it's been dropping in price. Portable heat pumps are becoming cheap enough to consider. Fixed installations are doable even in individual flats (obviously cheapest when during general renovation, and boring extra holes in walls isn't a big deal). The last few years made people switch from thinking about A/C as a luxury for the rich, and start thinking about maybe getting it some day. And our heat waves were quite light compared to the rest of Europe.
most people in Western Europe don't have A/C, houses are way better insulated for short-term heatwaves and people usually don't mind indoor temperatures of up to 80-84F/26-28C. If you add the general hate French (and I think German?) people have for drafts and air currents in general and you can see how people just deal with the heat in the summer.
Not to mention central A/C in the North American sense with a air handler & ducts is just never coming to France, it's such an outdated technology and forced-air heating is generally considered to suck there.
Hmm. Two years ago I was at the Louvre in May. I know Paris is very proud it doesn’t use AC but only “chilled” water from the Seine. Well with thousands of bodies, it was HOT. I was dripping wet from sweat and I was not the only one. I read that 15k people died in France during the 2003 heatwave. I find the slow adoption of AC disappointing as I am usually a Francophile. https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230717-parisians-a...
Most people who died in 2003 as a consequence of the heat where old people who laked enough care and dedicated resources. Lake of AC was maybe not a helper here, but there is more at play than just that.
That population is the most vulnerable, and indicative of the issue. The heat indeed killed them, but the availability/affordability of AC could have saved lives.
Yes, actually we finally found a house that was affordable for us last year, and made lot work in it, including wall isolation, changing windows, and install a heat pump, replacing the oil-for hearing system that was in place. Heat pumps are clearly on the rise around here, contrary to AC. There is of course no magic regarding electricity price here, but oil provision and prices are also big unknowns, all the more with the state pushing oil-fire systems out of market as a legal option.
Not billionaires or even millionaires. This is normal for a middle-class home in Canada and US at least. It's not that expensive to run and those who are tight on cash just run it less, only on really hot days.
Wow, didn't expect to be downvoted on something that is so obviously aligned with what I see around me. It is a very strange feeling, very different from downvoted posts that present unpopular opinions.
Apparently, Japan, USA and now China are huge users of AC in personal homes (like more than 90% of them). That's in sharp contrast with what is observed in most of Europe, including France where I live.
I never had the opportunity to travel to any of this country, so indeed I was totally blind of this extrem gap in use from my own personal experience.
We had window unit A/C in our very-poorly-insulated 100 year old farmhouse, when I was growing up and money was very tight, as in if we go shopping and eat out, you're getting water to drink, sharing a meal, and no dessert. Not like starvation levels of poverty but still, money was tight.
A/C was not considered optional, even if you could theoretically remain alive when the temperature was over 100F every day for weeks straight and stayed in the 80s (or even 90s) at night.
