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Comment by FacelessJim | Hacker News Reader

Americans don’t get scolded enough for their abuse of AC. In terms of accounting for preventable waste of energy, US guzzles more electricity on cooling than most countries do on everything else.

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Are you going to also scold Americans for using heat in the winter?

Our continent has more extreme weather than Europe... we've adapted accordingly because we value human lives. Have you?

Spain's continental climate has both subzero Winters and scorching Summers.

And they had 101 people die of heat-related issues last month. [1] 3,832 Spaniards died in 2025 alone from heat. In 2022, 4,789 died, the all-time high.

The entire United States had 2,325 heat-related deaths in 2023, which is the all-time high.

Do the math (US pop 340M vs Spain 49M) and it gets really ugly.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/spain-records-h...

Spain has far more elder people than the US.

AC is sorely lacking in the EU, e.g. right now I have one in my office but not in my bedroom and nights are horrible, but I do read a lot about people overdoing it quite a bit with AC, aiming at 18-20°C during 30s outside which is a huge energy expenditure when a healthy human should be perfectly fine at higher temperatures

When you refuse to build climate-appropriate homes with things like isolation and instead guzzle giant amounts of fossil-powered energy to compensate for it? Yes. That's not adapting, that's brute-forcing.

As a support for this comment: doing some estimations, the of average kWh household use in the US is about 10,500 kWh, with about 19% being used for Air Conditioning. The energy mix in the US is quite carbon-intensive, with an average of 0.37kg/kWh. That gives a yearly figure of 740 kg per household.

If we want to reach the climate targets, we need to reduce our yearly CO2 "budget" per capita significantly. It was at about 800kg per person & year for 1.5 degrees a few years ago. As we have resigned that target already, we're at about 1500kg per year & person for the 2 degree target. (estimations of total CO2 budget until 2050, divided by #people on earth).

After 2050, that number per person should go to net zero.

So the way Air Conditioning is used is a significant problem. If the entire world would use it like it is used in the United States, we would get into a runaway situation. And we kind of are heading towards it.

Yes, but we’re at least not dying of sweat.

We do a lot of things wrong but AC isn’t one of them.

(Unless you’re in the PNW where they never needed it before recently, and somehow continue to build units without it)

We deserve to be scolded for a lot of things, but not that.

Interesting, so that's the price you put on a life? And people say Americans are heartless capitalists.

"Abuse" -- what a BS term. It's used just as desired; how can that be "abuse"? Because we do what we want rather than what you want us to want?

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