4 ms·

This is a strawman argument. Air conditioning doesn't need to be used at the current levels it is being used to save exactly the same number of lives. So many p

This is a strawman argument. Air conditioning doesn't need to be used at the current levels it is being used to save exactly the same number of lives. So many people and businesses set the thermostat to the 60s. Even a setting in the 70s is totally unnecessary. Few people, if any, will die if the temperature is in the 80s or even 90s, and people could be honest about making such circumstantial choices. If the first world population used air conditioning less, it would allow poor people, the third world, who tend to live in environments that are hotter and more subject to costs of climate change, to use air conditioning more without adding more to humanity's carbon footprint. We as humans are quite greedy. We can live perfectly happy and comfortable lives with less plastic, less driving, less waste, but we have become addicted to all this consumption, all this convenience, and the ever greater convenience of consumption (couch shopping and to-your-door delivery, same day or hour even). We have tied our happiness to it. We have no qualms about being a small fraction of the Earth's population yet consuming and hoarding an extremely disproportionate amount of its resources, usually at the expense of poorer people, apparently because a meritocracy is at work. The modern world's values are ever more driven by "me, me, me!" and less by "us".

baryphonic 4y ago
> If the first world population used air conditioning less, it would allow poor people, the third world, who tend to live in environments that are hotter and more subject to costs of climate change, to use air conditioning more without adding more to humanity's carbon footprint. This is not the only way. We could also produce cleaner energy in the first world by e.g. building nuclear, solar and (probably off-shore) wind. Then those of us in the first world and the poor of the third world could have the life-saving AC technology, and maybe make the third world a bit richer in the process.

baryphonic 4y ago

> If the first world population used air conditioning less, it would allow poor people, the third world, who tend to live in environments that are hotter and more subject to costs of climate change, to use air conditioning more without adding more to humanity's carbon footprint. This is not the only way. We could also produce cleaner energy in the first world by e.g. building nuclear, solar and (probably off-shore) wind. Then those of us in the first world and the poor of the third world could have the life-saving AC technology, and maybe make the third world a bit richer in the process.