Because air conditioning uses 14% of all energy produced in the US and so much of that is people wanting to have their homes at 65 degrees or so. The same mindset of wanting to be a tiny king in a giant house is the same mindset that causes Americans to cool and heat their houses an absurd degree. Degrowth will create a less comfortable life, because the American standard of living is unsustainable. The point isn’t making Americans suffer for the sake of making Americans suffer, but rather them suffering is necessary for a better world.
is that only including ac to cool homes, or does it include the waste spent on cooling empty office buildings? additionally, this is stat is very inflated by suburbia, which I am all for destroying and forcing the vast majority of people living in it back into apartment buildings, which I think would heavily drop this number too. how far exactly do you think we need to drop american energy consumption???
That includes price buildings yes. It’s not just residential consumption. We’d need to drop American energy consumption by at least half I’d guess because you can’t cleanly change the entire power grid out in a decade. You’d need way less cooling, almost no EVs and individual transport, elimination of the advertising industry, greatly reduced mining among other things. US electricity consumption is split near-evenly between residential, commercial, and industrial and the plurality of residential energy consumption goes to heating and cooling. The electricity consumption of AC is nowhere near negligible and needs to be reduced one way or another.
like I said I think destroying suburbia will pretty much fix this without needing to hyperfocus on making americans not use AC but I guess we’re both just spitballing here so idk if it’s worth arguing about
Because air conditioning uses 14% of all energy produced in the US and so much of that is people wanting to have their homes at 65 degrees or so. The same mindset of wanting to be a tiny king in a giant house is the same mindset that causes Americans to cool and heat their houses an absurd degree. Degrowth will create a less comfortable life, because the American standard of living is unsustainable. The point isn’t making Americans suffer for the sake of making Americans suffer, but rather them suffering is necessary for a better world.
is that only including ac to cool homes, or does it include the waste spent on cooling empty office buildings? additionally, this is stat is very inflated by suburbia, which I am all for destroying and forcing the vast majority of people living in it back into apartment buildings, which I think would heavily drop this number too. how far exactly do you think we need to drop american energy consumption???
That includes price buildings yes. It’s not just residential consumption. We’d need to drop American energy consumption by at least half I’d guess because you can’t cleanly change the entire power grid out in a decade. You’d need way less cooling, almost no EVs and individual transport, elimination of the advertising industry, greatly reduced mining among other things. US electricity consumption is split near-evenly between residential, commercial, and industrial and the plurality of residential energy consumption goes to heating and cooling. The electricity consumption of AC is nowhere near negligible and needs to be reduced one way or another.
like I said I think destroying suburbia will pretty much fix this without needing to hyperfocus on making americans not use AC but I guess we’re both just spitballing here so idk if it’s worth arguing about