Anyone who says that doesnt understand our government hasnt modernized our electric grids at all. They cannot handle these ac demands and the ai datacenters they’re forcing down everyones throats.
Not this american. Ive been screaming my head off about how the machery our society runs on is all designed to run in a specific temperature range, and we are nearing the upper edge of that range now.
Most residential air conditioners can only manage a split of 30°F. That means if its 110 outside, your AC will struggle to keep the inside temp colder than 80°F. Sure, there are solutions for this. But they arent being implemented becsuse that is a problem for next quarter.
The truth is a lot (probably most) of Americans don’t have AC. It wasn’t really needed in most places until a few years ago. A lot of people rent and a lot of states don’t legally require AC in a rental. Because of that landlords refuse to install AC. If states started requiring it things would look a lot different.
I spent three hours convincing a couple MAGAs on nextdoor that global warming is real and we’ve known for nearly 100 years. Had to go into remedial science mode and explain why greenhouse gasses trap heat in, complete with videos showing CO2 experiments like they do in high school. One guy begrudgingly agreed but the second guy was shook. I think he started coming to terms with the fact he’s blindly believed lies and started questioning other “truths”.
There may be hope, but he might’ve just turned Fox on after and stuck his head back into the sand.
I was raised on a steady diet of fox news. When I finally became traveled enough to realize it was bullshit, I had to come to dozens of separate now seemingly obvious conclusions before i had a half-decent picture. Even CNN, ABC, CBS have their own stuff to sell. The media is a business, and it sells.
It’s been the defining sentiment to the story when discussed in the US. The GOP has taken to the rhetoric of comparing heat deaths in Europe to gun deaths in US, as in Europe is being far more irresponsible not installing AC than US is not controlling guns (their words).
This comment makes no sense. Am American am not maga but just FYI a/c also means central heating we have them bundled in 99% of buildings. If you are referring to the Texans who froze to death… They had heat just no electricity to run the heaters due to the transmission lines being down.
At least in my country (Netherlands) the neoliberals have decided every single fucking thing needs to turn a consistent profit and the company who handles the grid is only allowed to upgrade when there is “utility and necessity” which in essence means any time they want to upgrade in anticipation of future demand everyone involved drags their feet.
The result of that policy is that now there is a ridiculous waiting list for commercial grid connections and there are plans to also restrict new high capacity residential connections. For a country that has been run by businessmen for the past 20 years we sure seem to have an awful lack of long-term vision.
Don’t even get me started on the attitude that people here have towards A/C. We don’t live in a country that’s only hot for 1 week a year anymore but lots of ppl just won’t accept that. I guess it’s climate coping/denial combined with wanting to feel superior to Americans.
We will be cooked (literally)
EDIT: I just remembered that yesterday they unexpectedly had to cut power to 10000 homes for 14 minutes and it wasn’t even a hot day.
It’s crazy to me because surely you would be extracting more wealth from working people (and raising the blessed holy statistic known as GDP) with a grid that actually works and can take on new customers. I know they’re evil but I guess they’re also just stupid.
First they underprice anyone to dominate the market and end up as the only one left. They do this on borrowed money and then they need to monetize. That’s the R, the rest is other people’s money who cares.
Stuff like infrastructure should most of the time not be privatized and remain in state hands.
As a business you just need to outbid your opponent for the electric grid or whatever.
Then you do the bare minimum to say you delivered within budget etc.
People are sheep and won’t notice until they are sitting in the dark.
The company that had a realistic cost in their offer was probably not picked.
Which means whoever does the picking also doesn’t care about anything further away in time than “project declared done, money has been payed”. Time for me to take a break (been lamenting about these things for too long now)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
My house is fully off grid with a 36kW solar system and 86kWh battery setup. There are times where I can get down to the wire but ultimately that’s when it’s a prolonged rain /storm scenario.
The hotter it is the more likely the sun is shining, so I have zero concerns about a blackout situation. Realize this isn’t viable for most people but I sure am glad I took the plunge.
The reason that “it’s ok we have AC” is a dumbass small brain take is that the “it” that is allegedly ok in this scenario is global warming. AC won’t save most of the planet from the consequences of our choices and actions.
In europe we average out somwhere between 3 to 4000kwh per year for a household, where in the US it’s 10k upwards, which looks like a dramatic difference.
But we haven’t really looped in the fact that in Europe we mainly rely on natural gas solutions for climate control/heating, hot water and cooking.
Ofcouse they also use gas in the US, and invariably the fact that we don’t really cool our houses in the summer still works out to a lower usage overall i’m sure, but as we also shift to heat pumps I’m sure this’ll change.
Most people don’t cool their house because they can’t, not because of some principle against it. When people start replacing their gas heaters with heatpumps they can, and i’m sure they will.
We also can’t ignore we don’t really have those Arizona climates here.
Americans that complain about any lack of AC also forget that.
I think for the future we need to get green energy for very cheap here in Germany and Europe.
Everything should be electric including mobility, cooling, heating etc.
The future is not looking bright right now with the governments we have but I think technology wise that’s the future.
If I didn’t have AC, my very old asbestos ridden apartment would be over 110° farenheit. That’s 43° Celsius. I guess Europeans don’t give a shit about the giant corporations though. They just expect us and our pets to die.
Weird strawman here. No one’s saying to not use AC, it’s just not the solution to the actual problem and we shouldn’t pretend that it is because it’s convenient and “good enough” for now.
It’s not a straw man as an American who voted for Harris. I hate trump just as much as the rest of world does. The hate all Americans shit is mostly why I decided to humanize myself. We’re not all fucking maga nazis
AC here are nearly always split units though. Our windows don’t slide up, so harder to install that type of AC unit that sits on the sill.
I have windows that slide sideways, and an AC unit with two pipes (intake and exhaust) that go through a piece of plastic sitting in the window’s rail.
It’s terrible. Super loud, and the room gets hot again in a couple minutes after I turn it off.
Split units are almost always illegal to install because of local urbanism laws, or apartment lot rules.
Yes, this, fucking this. I do have a monoblock device because I’m not allowed anything else (Germany, apartment). I’m literally designing and printing stuff to mod it to dual-pipe (because for whatever reason the free market won’t even give us THAT) and also to route the cold air directly into another room so my ears won’t fall off. Of course the moment it’s off everything’s fucking warm again… and since the only room it can be in is by BEDROOM to cool down my living room for the day I have to get up at least at 8 AM even on weekends when it’s warm to open the window (directly to a loud street) to start the thing (65db baby, let’s go!).
I’m fucking pissed about all of this. But heeey, at least the building traps heat perfectly during winter, right? Just cooks everyone in the summer. But that’s “beautiful sun”, so I guess it must be good. Argh. 💀
And guess what… no sliding windows. In fact I have no normal windows even, just window doors. Those fucking taped on textile “air stops” will always detach eventually because of the underpressure the AC creates.
If I didn’t have AC, my very old asbestos ridden apartment would be over 110° farenheit. That’s 43° Celsius. I guess Europeans don’t give a shit about the giant corporations though. They just expect us and our pets to die.
I agree it’s not a solution but a shitty band aid. Still, fighting with each other just let’s the nazi billionaires rob everyone on earth blind and they are causing so much more warming than regular citizens
You say that as though corporations are fucking everything up for their own amusement, rather than in the service of making sure the “regular American” gets their luxuries for cheap.
Which luxuries? I agree that America is one of the biggest baddies when it comes to overconsumption, but fighting with each other just let’s the nazi billionaires rob us all blind
Who is fighting each other? No one’s saying that climate change is the fault of American citizens using AC. Just that “Oh it’s 45°C outside, guess I’ll pump up the conditioning and stop thinking about it” is not the way forward
Yep, and Americans answering with “we’re ok because we have AC” is a Don’t Look Up moment
Anyone who says that doesnt understand our government hasnt modernized our electric grids at all. They cannot handle these ac demands and the ai datacenters they’re forcing down everyones throats.
Not this american. Ive been screaming my head off about how the machery our society runs on is all designed to run in a specific temperature range, and we are nearing the upper edge of that range now.
Most residential air conditioners can only manage a split of 30°F. That means if its 110 outside, your AC will struggle to keep the inside temp colder than 80°F. Sure, there are solutions for this. But they arent being implemented becsuse that is a problem for next quarter.
yeah, its the new form of climate denial
https://theconversation.com/the-new-climate-denial-using-wealth-to-insulate-yourself-from-discomfort-and-change-199101
It was so hot last week, I had to move my fucking pepper pants inside.
losing a chunk of the growing season is going to go poorly in the near term
That’s some spicy legwear!
LOL Typo, but I do in fact own some pepper pj’s !
For hot nights!
where are these americans saying “we’re ok because we have AC”?
The truth is a lot (probably most) of Americans don’t have AC. It wasn’t really needed in most places until a few years ago. A lot of people rent and a lot of states don’t legally require AC in a rental. Because of that landlords refuse to install AC. If states started requiring it things would look a lot different.
Mostly MAGA looking to literally die on that hill, (or expect thier grandchildren to)
I spent three hours convincing a couple MAGAs on nextdoor that global warming is real and we’ve known for nearly 100 years. Had to go into remedial science mode and explain why greenhouse gasses trap heat in, complete with videos showing CO2 experiments like they do in high school. One guy begrudgingly agreed but the second guy was shook. I think he started coming to terms with the fact he’s blindly believed lies and started questioning other “truths”.
There may be hope, but he might’ve just turned Fox on after and stuck his head back into the sand.
Changing worldviews is hard.
I was raised on a steady diet of fox news. When I finally became traveled enough to realize it was bullshit, I had to come to dozens of separate now seemingly obvious conclusions before i had a half-decent picture. Even CNN, ABC, CBS have their own stuff to sell. The media is a business, and it sells.
I’d love to believe you convinced people on Next Door of anything. I usually only troll there. Place is a cesspool.
It’s been the defining sentiment to the story when discussed in the US. The GOP has taken to the rhetoric of comparing heat deaths in Europe to gun deaths in US, as in Europe is being far more irresponsible not installing AC than US is not controlling guns (their words).
Magaites with ac are in for a treat when winter eventually arrives
This comment makes no sense. Am American am not maga but just FYI a/c also means central heating we have them bundled in 99% of buildings. If you are referring to the Texans who froze to death… They had heat just no electricity to run the heaters due to the transmission lines being down.
Dont worry youll figure it out eventually
All over the frontpage last week. https://lemmy.today/post/55740469
I sure hope their electricity grid can handle it when everyone turns on the AC and data centers also start pulling extra because it’s so hot.
At least in my country (Netherlands) the neoliberals have decided every single fucking thing needs to turn a consistent profit and the company who handles the grid is only allowed to upgrade when there is “utility and necessity” which in essence means any time they want to upgrade in anticipation of future demand everyone involved drags their feet.
The result of that policy is that now there is a ridiculous waiting list for commercial grid connections and there are plans to also restrict new high capacity residential connections. For a country that has been run by businessmen for the past 20 years we sure seem to have an awful lack of long-term vision.
Don’t even get me started on the attitude that people here have towards A/C. We don’t live in a country that’s only hot for 1 week a year anymore but lots of ppl just won’t accept that. I guess it’s climate coping/denial combined with wanting to feel superior to Americans.
We will be cooked (literally)
EDIT: I just remembered that yesterday they unexpectedly had to cut power to 10000 homes for 14 minutes and it wasn’t even a hot day.
Well thats why, why would they ? why would voters elect them
Lots of temporarily embarassed millionaires + red scare propaganda still carved into people’s minds
Business men are myopic and not strategic for 30 years into the future? I am so shocked! 🙀 😲
They optimized their profit, just not yours you gotta understand. I.e the money is not gone it’s just somewhere else.
It’s crazy to me because surely you would be extracting more wealth from working people (and raising the blessed holy statistic known as GDP) with a grid that actually works and can take on new customers. I know they’re evil but I guess they’re also just stupid.
Take my upvote. I too fail to see how “make something work well, get more money” isn’t the obvious default choice for businesses
Because making it work well costs more than making it work barely, and those costs are ultimately profits not being paid to shareholders now.
Those making the decisions get paid their bonuses based on the now, not the maybe, in the future.
It’s really that simple.
Its like they only know the R in ROI. This short term thinking is the main driver of enshittification I think.
That, and the fact that the infinite growth model is a basic underpinning of capitalism. The Market must grow, always, or the whole carousel stops.
First they underprice anyone to dominate the market and end up as the only one left. They do this on borrowed money and then they need to monetize. That’s the R, the rest is other people’s money who cares.
Thank you. I still hate they don’t think about anything else at all, but this explains it
Stuff like infrastructure should most of the time not be privatized and remain in state hands.
As a business you just need to outbid your opponent for the electric grid or whatever. Then you do the bare minimum to say you delivered within budget etc. People are sheep and won’t notice until they are sitting in the dark.
The company that had a realistic cost in their offer was probably not picked.
Which means whoever does the picking also doesn’t care about anything further away in time than “project declared done, money has been payed”. Time for me to take a break (been lamenting about these things for too long now)
Subsidize heatpumps!
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.
Not to mention the care needed in designing and installing such a system so as to not make a mold factory.
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.
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.
Most of downtown Toronto has been cooled by deep lake water in Lake Ontario since 2004. Cuts electricity use by 75%.
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.
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?
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
👍
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
The only ones saying that are the ones thinking beach weather in the Chicago winter will somehow be a good thing.
They’re idiots.
No idea why that’s such a hot take by them. So many people have AC here. Houses, establishments, public areas, and increasing for obvious reasons.
AC here are nearly always split units though. Our windows don’t slide up, so harder to install that type of AC unit that sits on the sill.
You know what extreme heat can also cause? Blackouts.
And it happens all of the time because of the increased load on the grid from everyone cranking their AC.
Your AC is useless without power.
My house is fully off grid with a 36kW solar system and 86kWh battery setup. There are times where I can get down to the wire but ultimately that’s when it’s a prolonged rain /storm scenario.
The hotter it is the more likely the sun is shining, so I have zero concerns about a blackout situation. Realize this isn’t viable for most people but I sure am glad I took the plunge.
The reason that “it’s ok we have AC” is a dumbass small brain take is that the “it” that is allegedly ok in this scenario is global warming. AC won’t save most of the planet from the consequences of our choices and actions.
Still though.
In europe we average out somwhere between 3 to 4000kwh per year for a household, where in the US it’s 10k upwards, which looks like a dramatic difference.
But we haven’t really looped in the fact that in Europe we mainly rely on natural gas solutions for climate control/heating, hot water and cooking.
Ofcouse they also use gas in the US, and invariably the fact that we don’t really cool our houses in the summer still works out to a lower usage overall i’m sure, but as we also shift to heat pumps I’m sure this’ll change.
Most people don’t cool their house because they can’t, not because of some principle against it. When people start replacing their gas heaters with heatpumps they can, and i’m sure they will.
We also can’t ignore we don’t really have those Arizona climates here. Americans that complain about any lack of AC also forget that.
I think for the future we need to get green energy for very cheap here in Germany and Europe. Everything should be electric including mobility, cooling, heating etc.
The future is not looking bright right now with the governments we have but I think technology wise that’s the future.
If I didn’t have AC, my very old asbestos ridden apartment would be over 110° farenheit. That’s 43° Celsius. I guess Europeans don’t give a shit about the giant corporations though. They just expect us and our pets to die.
Weird strawman here. No one’s saying to not use AC, it’s just not the solution to the actual problem and we shouldn’t pretend that it is because it’s convenient and “good enough” for now.
It’s not a straw man as an American who voted for Harris. I hate trump just as much as the rest of world does. The hate all Americans shit is mostly why I decided to humanize myself. We’re not all fucking maga nazis
Happy for you, I guess. Maybe next time you’ll bring an actual argument to the discussion :)
I have windows that slide sideways, and an AC unit with two pipes (intake and exhaust) that go through a piece of plastic sitting in the window’s rail.
It’s terrible. Super loud, and the room gets hot again in a couple minutes after I turn it off.
Split units are almost always illegal to install because of local urbanism laws, or apartment lot rules.
Yes, this, fucking this. I do have a monoblock device because I’m not allowed anything else (Germany, apartment). I’m literally designing and printing stuff to mod it to dual-pipe (because for whatever reason the free market won’t even give us THAT) and also to route the cold air directly into another room so my ears won’t fall off. Of course the moment it’s off everything’s fucking warm again… and since the only room it can be in is by BEDROOM to cool down my living room for the day I have to get up at least at 8 AM even on weekends when it’s warm to open the window (directly to a loud street) to start the thing (65db baby, let’s go!).
I’m fucking pissed about all of this. But heeey, at least the building traps heat perfectly during winter, right? Just cooks everyone in the summer. But that’s “beautiful sun”, so I guess it must be good. Argh. 💀
And guess what… no sliding windows. In fact I have no normal windows even, just window doors. Those fucking taped on textile “air stops” will always detach eventually because of the underpressure the AC creates.
Don’t forget that’s also what richer asian countries think(China, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia)
America is the world’s bad guy, I agree, but not all fucking Americans voted for this fucking shit
An overwhelming majority either voted for climate change or didn’t vote.
If I didn’t have AC, my very old asbestos ridden apartment would be over 110° farenheit. That’s 43° Celsius. I guess Europeans don’t give a shit about the giant corporations though. They just expect us and our pets to die.
Uhm, ok. No one is saying that AC is useless. Just that it’s not a solution to our planet boiling.
Bro what
I agree it’s not a solution but a shitty band aid. Still, fighting with each other just let’s the nazi billionaires rob everyone on earth blind and they are causing so much more warming than regular citizens
Yeah blame all Americans and not the giant fucking corporations accelerating this shit ten million times more than the regular American
That is not at all what they’re implying with this
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floquant @lemmy.dbzer0.com Yep, and Americans answering with “we’re ok because we have AC” is a Don’t Look Up moment
Did you see the movie? I get a feeling that you haven’t.
matthurtme directing the conversation towards blame is in and of itself a Don’t Look Up moment lol
You say that as though corporations are fucking everything up for their own amusement, rather than in the service of making sure the “regular American” gets their luxuries for cheap.
Which luxuries? I agree that America is one of the biggest baddies when it comes to overconsumption, but fighting with each other just let’s the nazi billionaires rob us all blind
Who is fighting each other? No one’s saying that climate change is the fault of American citizens using AC. Just that “Oh it’s 45°C outside, guess I’ll pump up the conditioning and stop thinking about it” is not the way forward
floquant @lemmy.dbzer0.com Yep, and Americans answering with “we’re ok because we have AC” is a Don’t Look Up moment
What is? Please enlighten me. What is the solution when I’m baking in my apartment? Die?
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