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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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It's definitely not ok, but when treating the root cause will take decades if not centuries (which we absolutely should still do), perhaps it makes sense to look into treating the symptoms as well
To my knowledge a lot of ACs can't even operate at those temperatures, or only in a degraded fashion. The optimal maximum outside temperature of mine apparently is 35°C. After that the radiator can't get rid of the heat fast enough to have the inside unit work at full capacity.
There are genius ways to build homes that get cooled down even without electricity. See the "earthship" design for example, routing fresh air through pipes in the ground where it cools down, going through the home as the hot air gets sucked out by a "thermal chimmey" (literally creates airflow by using the sun). If we combined that with good insulation to avoid the sun heating up walls and windows we'd have liveable temperatures inside even at 50°C outside. But western countries not even remotely progressive enough for such a radical but necessary structural shift, so even right now we keep building houses designed to trap heat.
We're gonna end up having to go with geothermal heat pumps instead of radiators trying to dump heat in +40C air. this guy modified a window unit and was surprised at how well it did. Results @49 minutes. We should also be tripling our insulation requirements to cover the next 50 to 100 years.
Just realize the hole he dug is probably the bare minimum to handle the heat load from the smallest window AC. It takes a lot of digging to cool a real AC unit. And European homes aren't known for have large yards.
You can dig straight down, and run the ground loop vertically, but it's surprisingly expensive to dig the hole. Like 15-40k expensive.
I gotta say I understand the cost. Dig a full size grave by hand some time. It's freakin exhausting. And sure, an excavator can do it in minutes, but that means you're paying for time on a very expensive machine.
There's places with district heating from back in the days that people still invested in new infrastructure. We could do the same with cooling but I'm afraid the neoliberal rot has penetrated too far at this point.
Heating is easier than cooling. For heat you just run a set of lines from the source to the homes, same as plumbing. To dump that heat into the ground, the field you need grows very quickly. A small town would need a large, and probably deep field of pipes. The cost would be huge. Geothermal is great, but digging is hard, so it's relatively expensive. Every project needs to be individually considered, to determine if it's really the way to go.
Most of downtown Toronto has been cooled by deep lake water in Lake Ontario since 2004. Cuts electricity use by 75%.
Generic residential units are designed to move heat in the ranges they are operated under. Desert units exist that could work in much hotter conditions. Systems can be made to cool way up past 50°C.
But cooling the inside of a house/car is way different than trying to farm crops/animals in that heat.
Not to mention the care needed in designing and installing such a system so as to not make a mold factory.
Solar panels and air con are a good short-term solution for the symptoms
And by short-term I mean my whole life
That would make the oil lobby sad though
Why? Won't they just get to sell more fossil fuels to meet the electricity demand while politicians endlessly drag their feet on cheaper, renewable alternatives?
EDIT: Oh you mean treating the root cause, yeah true
👍
The problem is that treating the root cause is not profitable. So it will never happen. Ever.
That's not true. There is plenty of profit to be made with selling stuff that helps reduce energy use, selling energy that uses less fossil fuel (or produces less CO2), undercutting competition with more efficient methods, etc.
The tech world talks a big game about disruption and making billions or even trillions from it. You don't think there are people who want to make trillions disrupting fossil energy companies?
There is no treatment for the root cause, lol either we continue to pump co2 into the atmosphere or we stop. Either way, temperature increase is locked in for roughly a century at this point. We lost the fight for a livable planet. The human extinction event continues