Heating in the winter makes far more pollution than cooling in the summer!

Sure, sure. You want to "not die". What about me and my AI videos of women with 6 tits? Huh? *I* gotta sacrifice my wanking material just so you can survive?!

The majority of heat deaths occur *indoors*!

Yeah, and AC actually uses less energy than heating. All things considered, changing the temperature by one degree uses about the same amount of calories whether it be cooling or heating. AC lowers the temp by some 20 degrees at the most but heating raises the temp by as much as 50 to 70+ degrees.

There's another thread about this article and it's full of euros being callous, classist ghouls. Like having lived in a mild climate most of their lives they don't understand, or just don't care, what's coming.

heat index

But it shouldn’t be ‘Free’, otherwise it would be a ‘get out of Jail Free’ card for Climate deniers. So you should need a ‘Licence’ to install AC, - which you can get for free if you have Solar PV of at least an equivalent power consumption, - or you pay a fee to

fund an equivalent capacity, if you can’t have your own system ( - with deductions and exemptions for those with low incomes)

Especially dumb because AC is used in the day right as solar power peaks and makes the grid very low carbon!

I mean it is at a certain point, but that point isn’t “none”. I keep my house at 80 in the summer and 60 in the winter and I’m usually quite comfortable in humid as fuck Oklahoma while saving on my power bill. People who do the opposite (and I know many) drive me fucking crazy.

Of course that’s probably a self selecting sample, I also know many asswipes who roll coal and that also drives me up the wall.

Cooling a room from 100F to 75F uses less energy than heating a room from 35F to 65F

It's insulting to be lectured about power consumption for something comforting and sometimes necessary when AI and, before that, nfts likely use enough power in a single day to power ac in a house for a year

What's their "killing the planet" argument? Refrigerants? sCO2 should be pursued more vigorously. Energy consumption? Build more clean firm power!

How do I feel space heating? I'm very cold - but it's destroying the planet.

Also, heating uses more energy than AC does but this (British) person would never suggest that heating is just an indulgence used mainly by reactionary, climate-insensitive Americans.

Well the British policy is to let elderly and poor people freeze to death in their homes amid massive increases in energy costs so this is actually consistent. I don't think the Euros understand how consistently hot and humid much of the US is.

With more solar power the energy of air condition shouldn’t be the problem, as it usually sunny when it’s hot. And the world should learn, that you needn’t put it on 16Degree Celsius. 22 to 24 is better.

For a lot of the world it's going to be holding the temperature at 28 so people don't start dropping dead. It's just not about comfort anymore for vast numbers of people. Folks are used to thinking of ac as some kind of luxury and not life support for a hostile environment.

Yes. But in a lot of countries it’s used much too strong/cold. That’s too much energy for no real purpose and it just makes you feel you run into a heat wall if you go out.

There's going to have to be a cultural shift in how people think about AC. But I don't see any group that could teach that cultural change in the near future. : (

The good news is you can use clean electricity to power your A/C. Solar works great for this

Honestly heating is much harder to decarbonize

Heat pumps. Which will also work as an AC in summer. Win-win.

Yeah it’s just powering that heat pump with clean electricity in Winter which can be tricky in certain places. Need to develop enhanced geothermal and other technologies (distributed heat, heat batteries etc)

It isn’t a luxury where I live.

I've said this elsewhere but there's a kind of old world wisdom which dictates that heat is necessary for survival but staying cool is simply a kind of decadence. One of those beliefs that hasn't updated with the Modern Age and certainly not the past several Summers.

It's because the people who can't up with that "old world wisdom" lives in damp, cool climates that didn't see truly dangerous heat until this century. If you ask anyone from the Middle East, Northern Africa, Central America, or the Outback, they world probably disagree and tell you why.

I think this is it though - it is genuinely only in the last 3 or 4 years that we have needed to consider AC in the UK, so it does still feel like a luxury to many here

Now this is not to argue against all of us doing what we can…I do confess as I recycle and do other things these days I wonder what is the carbon cost of all the appalling wars raging? And why then is it my fault if we all burn?

Man, today is full of ridiculous bullshit articles LOL!

We need to go confiscate her radiators. If a/c is a luxury, heating is a luxury.

Of all the things destroying the planet AC has gotta be one of the most benign.

Im not going to die of heat stroke in my apartment so Elon musk can have a nazi chatbot that drains our power grid

Awful, awful take. NO! AC doesn't kill the planet. Fossil fuels are killing the planet. Pressure your utility/politicians to install solar farms, or put it on your own roof, or even offset it. People run ACs with balcony panels ffs 🤦🏻‍♂️

I do agree that major electricity being used for ACs can also be contributing to climate change that makes places hotter. But that doesn't mean people should suffer without an AC. This is a systematic problem, not a society problem.

Energy efficiency is fine and dandy but if AC is bad use of electricity I'd like an immediate moratorium on AI data centers.

So help us god if they put AI technology into ACs

Build more clean firm power. Problem solved.

Unless you would also say "No thanks, I prefer climate virtue) about heat in winter you simply aren't a serious person. And if you would, you're just wrong.

"In the US, where AC is ubiquitous and its necessity not up for debate" It's a more nuanced article than what you're implying. It goes into AC as a bandage solution when more sustainable cooling practices aren't being pursued.

Hey Europe, you know what one technology can heat and cool at > %100 efficiency all on green power Heat Pumps, get on board

AC is a merely heat exchanger. It moves heat from one place to another. Food refrigeration also relies on heat exchange. But I don’t see anyone getting rid of their refrigerator to save the planet. The solution is greener heat exchange tech. (Solar refrigeration exists, and it uses SOUND. 🤯)

Maybe, get rid of the AI first before we start moaning about something that's become necessary because of the effects of global heating?

AI is destroying the power grids more than AC. Also if we’d done fuck all about global warming and didn’t hit the 1.5 degree increase we’d be having way less crippling heat waves.

AC literally makes cities hotter overall. The answer is not AC, the answer is smarter city planning, more trees and other plants, less concrete and architecture that can dissipate and reflect instead of absorb heat. Try learning from African countries who have been solving this problem for eons.

Of course it should be noted that in the absence of better architecture that has been designed (or adapted) to mitigate heat, AC can be a fallback solution, but that doesn't make it a good or sustainable solution.

All homes in the south are built depending on conventional ac, not just for cooling but to prevent the mold that would occur in these types of builds being left vacant. We kind of need to rethink everything, but that is almost impossible rn

Yeah that's the thing, there ARE better more sustainable solutions to solve these problems but there is no political or popular will to build them.

We have to build homes differently but there are so many pressures and existing companies doing this shit over and over the same way, it's a lot of structural inertia. Like a glacier.

Modern conventional HVAC systems are fucking wild. Imma blame most residential architects for this. Throw in a few real estate agents, and add the construction giants on top of this flaming pile of shit. (I am a carpenter on some of this kinda shit)

It's lazy and gross and using failed concepts that are 75 years old

(the us south)

I've been ripped apart for the same comment...

Americans...

Yeah. I'm going to guess this was written by someone who lives somewhere that has never gotten above 85 degrees Ferenheit.

UK Guardian so surprised she didn’t make it trans people’s fault somehow

More importantly, ac isn't even environmentally bad. Its only bad if the main source of energy to power it comes from gas or coal.

Stop blaming us for global climate change. Blame the real polluters, the petroleum industry, abandoned wells, data centers, combustion engine vehicles, the Dept of Defense and the Military Industrial Complex.

Well... she's blaming the AC industry. Are you happy now?

Air conditioning and solar panels are the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire of technology, for what I feel should be obvious reasons. I'm a spreadsheet-driven person; solar panels and an electric car are the two best money decisions I've made in the last decade.

I live in Arizona. No ac here is a death sentence

Might be because people chose to build architecture in a very hot place that was designed for a temperate climate.

Like yeah no shit, your house that looks like something that might be built in western or northern Europe is not suitable for the Arizona desert.

and of course “I can have AC — but you can’t!”

There are no individual actions available which can significantly improve the climate outside of killing a billionaire. Making yourself miserable is not noble, be aware of what you use, sure, but stop accepting blame for things you had no control over so some rich fuck can avoid accountability.

So you're saying there is ONE individual action available...

Had to be someone living in England writing shit like this. I’d recommend her a summer in the tropics without AC.

yup that'd be the uk guardian

If the power grid went down on a summer day in Phoenix, the number of dead would be staggering.

We already lose more than 600 people to heat-related situations every summer while the grid is holding up

How, exactly, does she think her home is heated?

Oh totally agree..I’d die without AC .. this heat is oppressive …

Our biggest problem is we keep building the same fucking North eastern Maine house for every God damned climate

I've lived in climates where temperatures regularly exceed 40C with no AC and it's doable but you need very open/airy architecture, to spend most of your time outside (including sleeping outdoors in the hot season), and do nothing for hours in the middle of the day except rest in the shade.

And more stuff but point being surviving extreme heat without AC requires very different architecture, lifestyle, social norms etc that just aren't gonna happen in temperate countries.

Anakin Padme meme "We're destroying the planet with global warning. We must install heat pumps" "Great, they're really efficient at heating and cooling" "..." "For heating AND cooling?" "......"

Apparently ground source pumps are good for cooking, but you also have to drill down 200+ feet for each one so there's a huge up front cost. Capitalism isnt going to front that cost so we can get ground source heat pumps to the billions of people who badly need cooling.

Air source heat pumps however can be fitted in an apartment in a space smaller than a traditional British methane gas boiler. And both recent UK governments the article's writer lives under offer thousands of £ grants to everyone switch.

The only time I might need a/c is when the solar set-up is chucking power at a grid that can't currently use it, so I may get a unit. Even in Scotland, it just takes one day of dangerously high temps to make it worthwhile.

No one is more self-righteous about AC than the British.

My plan for PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST is give everyone - EVERYONE - air conditioning.

Sure. And a good way to decrease heat around you is plants, not concrete and asphalt and gravel.

It takes much more energy to keep houses warm in the winter in New England than cooled in the summer in Arizona, funny how that never comes up Also most European cities are above the US-Canada border's latitude so they need to be quiet too

in the summer we basically run our AC 24/7 and it hardly makes a dent in our electricity bill. It gets really hot and humid here, going without it is not an option. Hard to buy that it’s that energy intensive

We can build homes that has good insulation which will prevent heat coming in as quickly. We can also install heat pumps which can also cool down the house, which is more efficient than traditional air conditioners generally. AC is not a luxury but we can try to avoid traditional ones

THIS GREEN ELECTRICITY EXISTS REFRIGERANTS ARE FINE IF THEY DON'T LEAK MORE ENVIRONMENTALLY RESPONSIBLE REFRIGERANT IS AVAILABLE EVERY YEAR FREON ISN'T USED ANYMORE BECAUSE WE BANNED CFCs FOUR AND A HALF FUCKING DECADES AGO

How many ACs could run no problem with the energy that’s sucked up by data centers 🤔 across the UK?

Plus *heating* is far more energy intensive than air conditioning.

I have a British friend who describes suffering from the heat that sounds to my untrained ear something close to heat exhaustion and every time I bring up getting even like a window unit he scoffs. I’m actually concerned about his health!

British windows aren't suited to window units, unfortunately. They don't open the right way to fit an appliance in the gap.

...has he ever tried to brush it off by saying it would go unused in the winter or something to that effect

“It would only be used a couple days a year,” or something to that effect.

I think I know who you're talking about and I think I heard something similar from him a couple years back

Very hard to get window units for British windows, and I'm not sure how installing central A/C would work since almost all houses use radiators for heating not forced air... Climate change is hitting the Isles hard.

I think we'd end up knocking extra holes in the walls and running ducting across the ceiling to make it work in British houses

Which means unless it's made law that landlords have to provide it, renters are SOL

Might be able to put it in lofts and the run vents into the upstairs ceilings (which is what relatives in France have done) but not sure about the downstairs. Not much room for the plant. Heat pumps are being installed, but for use with radiators...

Living on a top-floor apartment without central A/C in 90-something temperatures has been a lesson for me in how you can get at least mild heat exhaustion without even really doing much and not realizing it until the symptoms start.

It’s happened to me here in the DC area a few times … older historical buildings are a lot easier to heat in the winter but not cool in the summer. I’d say in the early 20th century it never got warm enough to need AC.

Yeah, I spent most of my life living in the South and the South-Midwest hinterlands, so moving to Pennsylvania was...a change.

I always look for AC in my filters when looking for a place. The article mentions the increase of emissions for using it, but that’s still looking at the problem from a personal standpoint and not a societal one. We still have to live with what we have. We then need to fix the CO2 source.

I mean, I would love for all tall buildings to have a mix of greenery to pull out the CO2 and solar panels to reduce the use. But I know that’s never going to happen

I got heat exhaustion on vacation in Montreal last month and it was so nonspecific and weird it caught me off guard

I get heat nausea during the really hot days since a few years ago. It's absolutely horrible. The only solution to not getting it on the hot days is running the in the wall air conditioners in my house in every room that I have them other than the guest room anyway without being in them.

This way if I walk through the house in the living room my upstairs office and my bedroom I'm not getting the heat that comes with it. It's literally the only thing that stops the heat nausea. I can usually deal with having it on in whatever room then but not then.

Whatever room *I'm in that's supposed to say.

Yeah that’s what happened to me. I blew chunks. Then later on my sweating got dysfunctional, I was sweating buckets and feeling freezing. Crazy

That's terrible. I have a really bad problem with getting nauseous but I never throw up thankfully so far anyway. I also get nauseous sometimes just for random reasons out of nowhere and I just got some medicine refilled from my doctor yesterday. Just as needed.

I probably get nauseous sometimes just because of how much caffeine I have lol. But I still love my caffeine. The heat nausea is unavoidable though unless I have the air conditioner on. I can't stand going anywhere where there's no place to cool off. You need to have a place to cool off.

The near zero cost of electricity (generation plus storage) during the day in the summer should be changing people’s opinions on AC but I guess not

I think Ms. Besdington needs to read up on the short- and long-term damages high heat does to human bodies

How about air conditioners powered by solar energy?

No thanks, I've already had two heat strokes.

What happens when all of China 60% now with A/C and India @ 10% which are far behind America 90% in A/C per household gets A/C? Roughly a billion people in just two countries w/o A/C. Single family homes are becoming a luxury the planet cannot afford in summer.

Except that 70% of greenhouse gas emissions are from industry and corporations, not from private homes

China has plenty of solar power to supply electricity to it, and it's constantly building more.

For anyone less familiar with how heat is so dangerous, I highly recommend the book The Heat Will Kill You First if only for its first couple chapters. It goes into detail of the biological impact on the body with real-life examples www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jeff-...

She lives in fucking Brussels, which is 5 degrees cooler than *Seattle* in the summer.

It’s 90 in Seattle right now so maybe she’ll catch on soon

This article is insane. We could discuss emissions via the American diet, transportation, and ultra wealthy lifestyles, but people should just die of heatstroke to save a few kilowatt hours...

Like, it's been proven that supertankers and other oceanic military things are putting off so much pollution that nothing individual people can do matters, right? Is this just something we all decided to quit knowing so we could publish controversy-bait puff pieces?

The equator will start literally cooking people's organs without air conditioning

I’m tired of the onus always being on normal people to offset billionaires’ carbon decadence. AC (esp if your energy provider gens from renewables) is never going to be as harmful as private jets, domestic flights, forcing people to commute to the office so rent is paid on the office space etc.

It's a luxury in the sense that human society in the vast majority of places humans can live can and has existed without it (unlike, say, heat). But then so are "electricity" and "running water"

But, like all of the things you listed, it is a necessity in the sense that some number of people will die without it.

AC does cost energy. But it’s nothing compared to the other asinine things we use our energy grid on, and like you said it saves lives

The picture is a dang mini-split! They’re so efficient!

"The most efficient cooling technology is actually responsible for heating up the planet. Not all that other stuff. Just the life saving and most energy efficient cooling/heating technology known to humanity."

AC is also very energy efficient for what it accomplishes &, combined w/ good building practices & high quality insulation, can save lives for a relatively low energy cost. My cooling costs are ~$200 cheaper PER MONTH than my heating costs in the winter. No one is saying we should back off heating.

Focus on AC while ignoring the prevalence of SUVs & light trucks as personal vehicles, or the drain on our energy reserves by nearly useless datacentre applications (crypto mining & AI) is a capitulation to capital that’d rather see the poors die than spend a single nickel heading off climate change

Guys this is from the UK where ac is not normal. It's not like florida etc

Like literally I have never in my life seen ac in a domestic dwelling in the UK. You get it in some businesses but it's not a thing in the home.

Which is why so many Brits now die in heat waves.

these people forget how many people died in Texas when the power went out during the middle of a heat wave. alternatively, something something major corporations 70-80%+ of greenhouse gasses and toxic waste something something BUT YOU'RE A BAD PERSON FOR NOT DYING TO THE HEAT.

floods are #2 to heat. heat is the #1 killer

We have AC, we’re going to use it! It’s called modernization. But we can make it more efficient!! Doing without it is as dumb as saying “I’m not taking antibiotics bc we didn’t have them a century ago” and we’re building resistance to them so I’ll chance death. 🤦‍♀️

According to a climate scientist friend, we, ALL OF US have 5 years before climate change hell breaks loose everywhere on the plant. And unless we immediately start dealing with our carbon output, every single one of us will be heavily impacted. And she emphasized that it’s 5 years not 10 or 15.

70% of all pollution is caused by corporations. Do you really think shutting off your AC unit will change things?

It's a recent debate in the UK where basically 0 homes have A/C but people are starting to get it as summers get hotter

I was in the UK in August 2015. the highs were around 85F in London. Everyone was complaining so much about the heat. Nobody had AC. When it's 85 here where I live, it's quite bearable, even with the humidity (which was absent from the UK).

Smart building design is more robust than AC. You can get homes to a safe temperature by building them appropriately to the local conditions. These problems were solved like a thousand years ago. Then we decided we all needed houses that looked like a far northern Europe feudal lord’s country home.

Smart building design includes AC. Dumb building design excludes it because people are too stupid to understand thermodynamics.

It is in the UK. Almost no one has it.

Why do people never talk about heating like this? Furnaces produce C02 as well!

and would anyone, ever, apply this same argument to heating one's home?

Exactly. I will be installing ac in the future. My solar panels produce enough energy for ac’s for the entire block if need be.

Same story here. My solar panels produce way more electricity than I use in the summer. Winter is the issue, but no one frets over keeping your home warm enough to live in. It's stupid moralizing to worry over AC and not heat. By all means, make your HVAC more efficient, but come on.

I agree that AC is not a luxury, but the level of AC many Americans have accustomed themselves to is a luxury. It's important to protect your health AND to use it responsibly.

It’s also by definition already electrified so it can use nuclear or renewables.

This is some shit people say that don’t live in the South. When people’s HVAC goes out there is genuine fear. It is in no way a luxury. Also, AC removes moisture from your house, preventing mold from growing on drywall. Modern homes would quickly become death traps without AC.

She lives in Brussels, where the temperature isn’t gonna get above 80F the entire week. Her column is the equivalent of someone who lives in, well, Brussels telling people who live in rural areas that they should take more public transit. Tone deaf AF.

My chronic illnesses are extremely heat sensitive, looks like I'm just gonna have to suffer til the end of time

Its amazing how many europeans are cool with cooking more than 100,000 babies and grandparents alive every summer

Should I die so companies can produce more?

I was in 5th grade & went home to a friend’s aunt’s house, she was taking us to a wrestling show. She was maybe 25 & very fit. My friend moaned “you really need to get AC it’s too hot here” & she explained she prefers the heat & hates AC. A month later she died from a heat stroke in her sleep.

If it wasn't for the nights getting cold still, I'd be so miserable being without AC. *cold being high 50s low 60s

HAHAHAHAHA. If it gets into the 70s here at night, it's a win.

Kind of eugenicsy if you ask me

Well you see, warming houses (primarily for white people) is morally much more correct than cooling them (primarily for brown people, what a coincidence!) so it's fine to dedicate resources to warming but not to cooling. *insert eye roll here*

all of this, yes. one can have air conditioning without contributing to climate change, too. there are solutions—consumer grade feasible solutions available *right now*—that solve the putative concern. anyone opposed to ac access is just promoting suffering and death.

Also, heating homes in the winter consumes way more energy anyway but you would never see these people advocate not doing that (for good reason!).

It's 2025 and Brits have just discovered extreme heat? Tilting at this particular windmill exposes the guilt she feels as a contributor to climate change, just as nearly all of us are.

Yes. My church is preparing to take our turn operating a cooling station in the fellowship hall next month. Three local congregations are trying to fill in where local government cut funding. In Arizona, in summer. Which will cost lives.

The state of Texas - yeah, that Texas - doesn’t turn off electricity during the summer for people who don’t pay their bill. It would cause hundreds of deaths by heat stroke if they did. When you’re advocating for a position that Texas actively avoids to prevent death, maybe rethink it.

AC is not a luxury, especially for elders. My grandmother called up crying when I was 19 because the company we paid to "emergency" fix her AC hadn't come for three days and she was too hot. This precipitated the dual emergency of picking her up and keeping me from going to their office with a bat.

Emma Beddington have her AC turned on while writing this. Does she ever come to Spain in July during a heatwave?

No, AC shouldn't be a luxury, provided we use it wisely. What's the ideal temperature indoors when it's so hot outside? Is it healthy to drop more than 10⁰C just crossing a door when your body is sweating?

I will never listen to a European in regards to AC. They'll have a "blistering heat wave" of 89F and 5 million elderly will die.

You are correct. But the laws of thermodynamics cannot be ignored. If you make one place colder, you must make another place hotter. And you must expend energy to do so, which ends up as even more heat. I don’t make the rules, I just sweat the details.

Unregulated corporations are dumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than every household on the planet combined. You're lecturing the wrong people.

Cooling is far more energy efficient than heating a place is and yet no one is lectured about having heating.

Sorry, that’s not how thermodynamics works.

It is easier to cool 10 degrees than heat 50 degrees.

Not a luxury, but goddamn is it ever overused. There are MANY businesses and homes that I cannot even BE inside for five minutes in the summer because they make it so cold it hurts. A lot of stores air condition the place then leave all doors wide open. As with all things, just… responsible usage!

Anyone who says AC should be options has never even visited a place that gets hot and they should shut up. AC is as critical as electricity and refrigeration.

This is a real estate developer problem. If folks want us to live in houses without AC, they would've had to decide that at the architecture phase, cause like, i don't think it's possible to convert existing housing to passive cooling without it costing more than the original build.

AC is absolutely life or death for many disabled and chronically ill people. So, preach!

If she fixes the global warming, we'll be all set.

I mean that's the point of the article, as it gets hotter AC uses more power which thus emits more carbon which thus increases heat which thus makes AC use more power, so installing more air conditioning excarcebates the problem it means to solve. It's also from a european perspective where

AC is fairly rare, so mass adoption could cause significant emissions.

Ofc it's a wealthy sod who can jet off to climes where they're not going to die from heatstroke, or eat in restaurants and stay in hotels with it on in the background constantly. Take is full of privilege. It is not the survival needs or luxury wants of the poor that are killing the climate.

Climate policy needs to be less AI and Private Jets more AC. Simple.

I suppose it's easier to wring your hands and look worried about something you perceive as a luxury, than to tackle any of the systematic issues that necessitate the use of AC in the first place.

Well... the point is that indeed we should do the other things first, and the AC in last resort when the rest doesn't work. But AC shouldn't be "the default". We should put more trees in cities, isolate better, shift working hours to keep people from the heat at the worse hours, etc

How do these people think their homes get warm in the winter? Some magic heat fairy that somehow doesn't also ... consume energy and resources?

I’ll stop using AC when private jets are eliminated. Preferably with the billionaires still inside.

I won't.

My question is for the Guardian journalist – would she say the same about heating in winter?

This is a really good point. There's a lot of "coding" that happens in culture and media: heating is essential, AC is a luxury; miner and steelworker are a real jobs, nursing or creative work isn't; rural white people are "real citizens", brown and/or city folk aren't.

Interestingly, this coding of in- and out- is very, very important to conservatism

Case in point H/T @faineg.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/fain...

My mom thought this back in the 80s, so the first car they had back then had no AC. The second car sure as shit had AC.

I’m with you in general, but here in the UK we might need it 10 days in the year at most so it’s not even close to being seen as vital, which does give us space to think about options

Heat pumps are both AC and very efficient heating. AC is not an optional luxury, it's an intrinsic part of making houses more efficient year round and decarbonization of housing.

Such an insane thing to say. Like how about cut the number of cars in half and let people ride the bus from one A/C building to another?

sustainable public transit? renewable energy? legislation against planned obsolescence, price gouging, realty monopolization, and all the other practices killing people and flushing resources? nah, die sweating peasants.

Back in the 90s, every year the Washington Post always ran an article by someone claiming moral purity because they never used air conditioning. It had to be timed v carefully: after a hot day; before people started dying. I see the UK has decided to take over the tradition.

Has the ubiquitous usage of heat pumps ever been modeled? Or is it just a matter of "Electricity Bad, Sweat Good"?

Heat pumps, which are better for the environment than standard heating methods, can also be used for energy efficient air conditioning in warmer weather. The idea that air conditioning need necessarily be a power-hungry luxury is outdated in every sense.

Sounds like someone doesn’t have a medical condition where the heat will fucking ruin you if you manage to not die

Climate change is the villain, here. Not people trying to stay cool enough to function.

Every few years someone shows up with this hot take but as an expert on extreme heat, in years of Maryland data around extreme heat morbidity and mortality the number one factor in survivability is (active) air conditioning.

There are heat pumps that produce both heating and cooling. Retrofitting these systems is very common in Canada

Congratulations. We don't have a humane government, and our federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr with 42% of jobs paying less than $15/hr, while it now takes around $25/hr for a single adult to survive in most places in the US. As of right now, AC is the best we can do.

I would love those fuckers to work with me one day and tell me it is unnecessary. I'm currently throwing packages in an 85 degree building and taking my breaks in my car because I have ac there. Fighting heat exhaustion the entire fucking way.

The fact that it's always the Europeans and especially the Brits losing their shit over other people's choices on how to deal with TEMPS THAT CAN KILL PPL just further convinces me this is some latent colonizer shit kicking in, like cruelty autopilot just when a hot climate even gets MENTIONED

just gonna leave this here for people that are confused bsky.app/profile/de-s...

because people seem to be talking about how, yes, air conditioning is necessary, which is so objectively true that stating it feels kind of silly the people writing these articles are not trying to debate— they’re trying to manufacture consent for when they start culling people by shutting AC off

And it's the most vulnerable who go first: the elderly, the disabled, and the very young.

Yes, and we have technological ability to replace fossil fuels with clean sources. So it is not a logical inconsistency to want to give people AC while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We can do both. People need to stop with false dilemmas. More AC. More clean energy.

One thing I try to point out to people is how really we aren't killing the planet, it will outlive us. We're killing ourselves. Usually the practical difference doesn't seem that big but this is a notable exception

Everyone should move to Maine. I think I want to move to Maine.

I live in Portland and my heat pumps are awesome. Our summers are getting hotter. That being said, Maine is a great place to live!

Too many killer clowns.

Just don't walk too close to the storm drains🎈

Anchorage should be lovely in ten years time

Mainer here: Maine gets surprisingly hot and humid in the summer. It hit 100 last week. Everyone has stopped installing window units and started installing heat pumps for cooling.

Tadoussac, Quebec is nice this time of year. Years back the hotel I stayed in didn't even have ACs because they didn't really need them.

Can’t trust a British take on this issue

Lot of angry people who didn't read the article here. She should've written it a bit better because I agree with her that there's better cooling solutions than AC.

AC isn't a luxury but the shitrag that is The Guardian is.

Heat is the number one stresser on hearts of the elderly.

lots of things destroying the planet also don't keep millions of senior citizens alive in the summer

Huge regions of the globe are still keeping themselves alive in winter by directly burning wood and petrochemicals but you don’t see these fuckers telling them they should just die of cold for some reason Almost like it’s Puritanism not environmentalism driving them

wait till they find out about agriculture

Imagine if they learned about the English…

also: heating is more energy intensive than cooling afaik

Does anyone do just use a microwave to drink hot beverages takes (plus layers of clothes)?

by a significant margin, yes

it’s cause most heating is raw resistive heating or burning fuel. heat pump heating is nearly as efficient as heat pump cooling yet isn’t even remotely common in cold weather areas

That's true, and it's why I am such a big supporter of programs to help cover the cost of installing heat pumps (Thank you Massachusetts!) but even then, think about the temperature differential. My heat pumps need to work that much harder to make up 40-60 F in the winter vs. -10-25 F in the summer.

yes! i do know they don’t work as well. but for residential needs it’s still more efficient than powering nichrome until you get below 5-10C

not to mention the ongoing boom in renewables making it less problematic (possibly less applicable in britain idk)

I did take a peak at the mix for yesterday here in the UK, and whilst we weren't burning coal, we were burning still far too much gas (about a third plus). Don't get me started on the fact the UK is actually well placed for renewables but we can't have nice things.

dude tell me about it (I say from New England)

And the incredible efficiency from heat pumps and ductless mini-split systems vs older central hvac systems.

You know how you can instantly reduce your carbon footprint? Move from Poland to France... Guess what the not-so-secret ingredient is? And guess what the Polish government is doing?

Replaced the AC renovating the condo. Heat pumps aren't suitable for every climate, nor are they a panacea, but they are certainly a mature technology. And modern U-shaped window AC units are an improvement on ~that technology.

Heat pumps are freaking amazing.

The invention of fire has considerable drawbacks for humanity.

Oh we can solve that by having everyone homestead, raising a small bed of cabbage etc. Basically all the food you need. And instead of AC, you wave cabbage leaves in front of your face!

Many have! We've already had a few times of "left-ish" discourse of why we just need to get back to everyone individually growing their own food, as if millions wouldn't die from that.

Humanity spent millennia attempting to move beyond subsistence agriculture and these people want to retvrn to it, while at the same time disproportionately screwing over the Global South who benefited immensely from the Green Revolution. Excuse me while I metaphorically punch a wall.

It is quite...intriguing, we'll say...how often the worst "left-coded" takes actually abandon leftist principles in some way and still center on wealthy countries/the US. "US bad, therefore USAID bad" "Capitalism bad, therefore destroy modern agriculture" The conclusion is always the dumbest one.

Normal Island strikes again.

this is the go to starbucks less of the environmentalists

Not to be morbid, but for some anti ac people this is probably a selling point

I hope none of them drive cars, eat meat, or buy things made in another town.

Not to mention babies. How much has the SIDS rate been cut down with the rise of A/C in people’s homes?

Always difficult to ascertain who’s the real employer of some of the UK journalists

AI causes far more ecological problems than AC, so where are the articles demanding we restrict our AI usage?

How we produce energy is infinitely more important than how we consume it.

Plus: if she only need to turn it on 10 evenings a year she is not really in a position to preach about this.

Two things can be true

Not to mention, ya know what is airborne *right now* that can cause heat intolerance? It's covid. Y'all do not want to find out what it is like to have the **literal fuckin' sunlight** hurt you. (Much empathies to everyone that has this disability even before covid, it's so fucked up)

There are so many health conditions that cause heat intolerance. The issue is that climate activists just don't care. It's why I don't participate. Their solutions are never inclusive, and when this gets pointed out, their "sacrifices must be made" BS is straight out of eugenics.

Terrifying 😭🌸

It is. And they really don't see it, which is even MORE frightening.

I take meds that cause it. I can’t stand sitting in the shade in temperatures I could withstand for hours before i started taking them.

That fuckin sucks 🌸

I’m sorry you’re dealing with this. ♥️ Heat intolerance is a bitch, love sweating and being uncomfortable with AC on /s I’ve fainted from being too warm since I was a kid, first time I was in a church full of kids and was the only one who went down.

Good gods, I'm so sorry, that must've been scary 😔🌸

I scared the crap out of the nuns. For 40+ years I honestly just thought fainting was normal. Finding the disability/chronic illness community has been a godsend. I’m so sorry that you’re dealing with this too! ♥️♥️♥️