Unfortunately American homes are designed with heating and cooling as an afterthought. Most of them are just designed with ducting and an HVAC to fill their needs, to keep design and building costs low. This naturally leads to terrible ventilation, a key ingredient of effective passive or low-energy heating and cooling. Without any active HVAC system, many of them hold in heat and don't cool down, or become much too cold because of how badly insulated they are. Modern code mandates better insulation and useful advancements like H/ERVs and heat pumps but American local governments do almost nothing to push their homeowners to update their homes to new code.

Tools like ceiling fans and attic fans are unheard of these days. Awnings to bring in winter sun and keep out the summer sun aren't considered. And despite a lot of the US being dry enough for evaporative cooling, they still mostly use AC. Most people have never heard of an H/ERV.

Hopefully as awareness of climate change increases, this changes. As for me, I live in a dry climate and through the summer our evaporative cooler is a mainstay. With the help of some ceiling fans, and well placed windows, we can go most of the year not using our AC at all, and having the evaporative cooler blowing cool, moist air on us feels fantastic on a dry summer day.