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Comment by chosenbreed | Hacker News Reader

Interesting...there a few comments putting forward the case for energy expenditure to provide heating and cooling. Can't really argue with any of them. However, I wonder how much of the need is driven by the modern lifestyles we have now. I appreciate that the planet is getting warmer (and that perhaps we're seeing more severe winters) but how did people get by 100 years ago? Or a 1000 years ago? How did people survive the heat? How did they survive the cold? We can't turn back the clock but perhaps there's something to gain by looking at the past...

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> How did people survive the heat? How did they survive the cold?

Well they often didn’t. People still die from cold winters and hot summers, especially old people. Air conditioning and heating is not a luxury for some of these people.

This. I'm from a tropical country. My grandmother told me stories about plantation work back in the day - people used to literally drop dead from the heat all the time.

Well, in the past we (a) died younger and (b) burned a lot of things for heat. I'd argue that literally nobody wants to go back to (a), and if every household in the world was still burnings a stove to stay warm we'd have an even worse global warming situation than we currently have.

> and if every household in the world was still burnings a stove to stay warm we'd have an even worse global warming situation than we currently have.

Speaking of burning things in stoves, this reminds me of a way to get people to burn all sorts of nasty things in wood stoves:

Tax the crap out of electrical energy and/or fossil fuels.

Make people pay a lot to dispose of their trash.

It's good to remember that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Buildings were optimised for doing the job without electricity. The walls, roofs and openings were in the right-ish places.

If you can use power to heat/cool, you don't have to put a door in the climatically optimal position, you can put it wherever you want. So people do nowadays.

That's all, really.

No, let me give an example: if you have big windows towards the sun, the sun will heat the air behind those windows. You can then design the house so that the air stays mostly in place and the energy input will heat the house, or so that the energy input will stimulate airflow. Or you can forget about that when you build and just use air conditioning to heat/cool the house.

They survived the cold by building shelters and houses with the materials they could find, for example; native american longhouses. In warmer climate, I heard the temperature under trees, in the jungle, while being humid, is much more tolerable.

Another thing you can do in warmer climates is to just not expend energy when it's hot. It's tolerable in the morning and evening, so work then. Modern business doesn't accomodate this, hence air conditioning.

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