In tropical places we deal with heat by having open houses that allow breeze. But I don't know that will work in a place with winter. I offer no solutions but increasing energy consumption across Europe isn't one.
Really the main issue in Northern Europe is that houses do not even have blinds. In Italy or Greece it's not too common to have AC either, but people live just fine by shutting the blinds during the day.
Compare Antwerpen[0] or Brussels[1] with Milan[2] or Crete[3] or Barcelona[4]
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@51.219842,4.4006387,3a,75y,64.8...
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8398344,4.3562283,3a,75y,90....
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@45.4558029,9.1837501,3a,75y,29....
[3] https://www.google.com/maps/@35.3266049,25.1255372,3a,75y,34...
[4] https://www.google.com/maps/@41.3880801,2.1358851,3a,75y,256...
Coming from France it seems weird to me, and obviously blinds would come very handy right now, but there are obviously a lot of houses with no blinds in Belgium, I can see them from where I stand.
Unless you're talking about curtains or other things that sit inside the house, which are basically useless against heat.
"And the ubiquity of AC has had a serious impact on how and maybe most profoundly where we live. Hot places like Arizona and Florida saw huge influxes of residents. A mass migration to the so-called “Sunbelt” changed the political map, too, as electoral college seats moved with citizens. And since a lot of these new southward migrants were conservative retirees, they voted Republican, forming a key target demographic in Reagan’s election in 1980."
It’s hot. Get air conditioning. Build some nuclear plants to make more clean electricity. Problem solved.
Funny thing - the nuclear power plant in Grohnde, Lower-Saxony will be shut down for at least the next two days, because the river ("Weser"), which is used for cooling, is too hot.
source: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/niedersachsen-we... (only german articles, sorry)
All I can figure is people have been heating themselves for 10's of thousands of years and AC is a distinctly modern phenomenon. From Mother Earth's perspective it would be far better for humanity to live in the tropics with AC than nearer the poles with heaters.
AC is not a waste of electricity, quite the contrary, if it can be inverted (that is, pumping hot air in instead of out) then it's more efficient than electric heating.
Certain institutions need air conditioning though -- hospitals, elder care, etc. so I wouldn't forbid it outright -- but using AC everywhere seems excessive (written at 33°C at 20:23 in Germany).
I don't understand why this particular total misunderstanding of physics comes up in so many contexts (a lot of anti-evolution types claimed it too in the past). The 2nd Law states that total entropy cannot decrease in a closed system. Yet a bit of reflection should reveal that somehow we manage to decrease local entropy all the time. In turn one may, once or twice, notice an enormous sphere of thermonuclear fusion in the sky that provides most of Earth's primary energy input. And at other times you may have noticed an enormous inky void into which energy can radiate away from Earth. Which should reveal that we in fact live in a locally open system, not a closed one. What controls the local general temperature is the equilibrium between energy input and what is radiated away. That's what greenhouse gasses change.
So no, you're completely and utterly off, AC does not in any way cause any trouble when it comes to the problem of global warming. The energy after all would have been transformed to entropy regardless. What matters is the greenhouse gasses that exist in the atmosphere.
That doesn't sound like a big issue to me.
[0]: https://www.popsci.com/ask-us-anything-does-using-ac-make-it...
It doesn't work that way. Aircons dump unusable waste heat into the environment. On a large enought scale, it creates global warming on it's own.
Same with solar panels, they change the albedo of the earth surface, and this will be a huge problem in the future.
Any amount of energy we can ever generate from nuclear is trivial compared to the insolation. Average daily insolation on Earth is 6 kWh/m^2. Earth area is 5.1e+14 m^2. This means we get 3e+15 kWh daily from sun, or 1.1e+18 kWh annually. On the other hand, we produce 2e+11 kWh electricity annually. This means that solar insolation is 7 orders of magnitude larger than our electricity production.
We already grew our energy consumption 4 orders of magnitude in 300 years.
http://bwp.io/blog/2014/thermodynamic-limits-of-human-energy...
Obviously you consider the concept of Type II and Type III civilizations impossible and ridiculous, since they would use more than 20 orders of magnitude more energy than we do.
Note, that when I said "all of India being airconned" I literally meant all of India, as in the whole subcontinent being a single giant city with 100 billion people living in it. And on that scale you need energy not only for airconn, but food/water/waste disposal/... But I guess you exclude that possibility too. It's understandable through why you would just imagine that I was talking about making India into something like present day Europe. In general people find it really hard to imagine anything radically different than the status quo.