[IntrepidWorm]

It is much more effective to do more with less. There will always be a need for air conditioning in some cases, but having 10 million single window units blasting walls of heat into a crowded city very quickly becomes an arms race where nobody wins (except perhaps the AC manufacturers).

Finding efficient ways to use our energy matters just as much as finding efficient ways to produce our energy. Keep in mind as well that many of the current methods of manufacturing green technologies only end up exporting their carbon to the global south.

[asoneth]

Due to the Jevons paradox making air conditioning more efficient will most likely increase energy consumption.

Whereas if you increase the price of energy (e.g. carbon fees) then you will reduce consumption and incentivize more efficient air conditioning as a side effect.

Unfortunately while the former is counterproductive the latter is politically unpalatable so we'll end up either doing nothing or making the problem worse.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> Due to the Jevons paradox making air conditioning more efficient will most likely increase energy consumption.

Good. That means more people now have access to it and it is a good thing.

Another example is clean water. If clean water is abundant, people will use it for more drinking and cooking and bathing. That is a good thing.

[asoneth]

Absolutely. More efficient technologies will make life more pleasant for many people. On balance I think this is a net win for humanity and am in favor of ongoing work in this area.

However, I should have been more specific when I said making air conditioning more efficient is counterproductive. I solely meant counterproductive towards the assumed goal of decarbonization in response to the prior comment's claim that "finding efficient ways to use our energy" is a viable strategy to address climate change.

Without pairing that efficiency with real solutions like putting a price on negative externalities, increasing efficiency is significantly more likely to increase overall energy consumption than to decrease it.

[AbrahamParangi]

The bitter lesson is that, actually, quantity usually beats efficiency.

Increasing efficiency has a brutal difficulty that is constrained by thermodynamics whereas the universe is almost limitlessly full of energy, space, and mass.

[sclarisse]

> having 10 million single window units blasting walls of heat into a crowded city very quickly becomes an arms race where nobody wins (except perhaps the AC manufacturers).

Is this more or less energy than would be used for heating, in an equivalent city that seldom wants A/C? Remember, with the exception of heat pumps (hardly universal and less efficient at low temperatures) A/C is usually much more efficient at changing indoor temperatures, and also that 100F -> 72F is a smaller temperature difference than 32F -> 72F.

[nerdponx]

In this particular case it's a question of putting a lot of concentrated heat into one area, compared to thinking about the overall energy budget.

Part of the problem with heat is that above a certain threshold you basically just die without recourse. Whereas with the right survival equipment, humans can tolerate a surprising amount of cold for a surprising duration, with a wide range of sophistication from "a blanket because you're shivering" to "full-body survival suit because the wind will instantly freeze your skin". That is, you can survive fairly cold temperatures without "burning" anything other than calories, if you have the right clothing. But above a certain heat and humidity threshold, there's no recourse and you automatically die without external energy input.

It would be pretty interesting to do some kind of analysis on the total energy expenditure on maintaining human homeostasis in a hot climate compared to an equivalently cold climate. But you have to take that threshold effect into account, that people can tolerate being cold for a while, but cooling becomes a strict requirement sooner than heating becomes a strict requirement, so you actually might need to pump around more total energy in the hot climate case compared to the cold climate case, even though cooling is more efficient than heating.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

I spent a few days recently in Vermont where it was hot but the wind was able to blow straight through the cabin and no A/C was necessary. No matter how many window fans I use in my apartment it doesn't come close. Buildings are not designed to do this, they're designed to pack humans together. I'd say that we need more efficient buildings but then we would also need to tear down what we have. That's more carbon!

[nerdponx]

Part of the concern with climate change is that you could start seeing literally uninhabitable hot temperatures in more and more parts of the world, which passive cooling are unable to save you from. You can get pretty far with warm gloves and weak fire in Vermont winter, but if the summer heat conditions are right, you just die no matter how tough you are and no matter how much air flow you have. That's not exactly a problem in Vermont yet, but people already die of heat stroke in the summer in the Northeast, and that's going to get worse as the climate gets warmer, with the disparity of course being along socioeconomic lines.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

I mean that we wouldn't have to crank the A/C and create more carbon emissions if buildings were designed for natural airflow. Now that it's heating up you are correct that this becomes more difficult.