There are lots of green parties in Europe and they have always been against mass AC because of their energy use and because it lets poor city design and poor insulation off the hook. There’s also the fact that the ACs have to compensate for making it cooler indoors, so outdoors gets even hotter. It’s an argument I’m sympathetic to, honestly.
But I suspect that the real reason AC isn’t widespread is because there isn’t capacity on the electric grid and high electricity prices scares people off, in short a complete failure of European energy policy, for which the Greens are partly to blame with their hasty shutdowns of polluting and nuclear plants while the renewables rollout keeps getting stalled by political winds and NIMBYism.
And because the left parties typically pool from the same voter base as the Greens they believe the same, even a self-declared Marxist party like the Belgian PVDA/PTB is still against nuclear although not as adamant about it.
Something interesting and bizarre that these points don’t really cover, is why they’re still opposed in public buildings like hospitals. If you’re going to cool one building, it should be a hospital. It wouldn’t even be that big a stress to the grid. Just suffering for the sake of suffering.
I want to emphasise that they’re not the only ones to blame, I do think they get scapegoated a bit too much sometimes. Insurgentrat in this thread does a good job explaining all the other reasons
There are lots of green parties in Europe and they have always been against mass AC because of their energy use and because it lets poor city design and poor insulation off the hook. There’s also the fact that the ACs have to compensate for making it cooler indoors, so outdoors gets even hotter. It’s an argument I’m sympathetic to, honestly.
But I suspect that the real reason AC isn’t widespread is because there isn’t capacity on the electric grid and high electricity prices scares people off, in short a complete failure of European energy policy, for which the Greens are partly to blame with their hasty shutdowns of polluting and nuclear plants while the renewables rollout keeps getting stalled by political winds and NIMBYism.
And because the left parties typically pool from the same voter base as the Greens they believe the same, even a self-declared Marxist party like the Belgian PVDA/PTB is still against nuclear although not as adamant about it.
Something interesting and bizarre that these points don’t really cover, is why they’re still opposed in public buildings like hospitals. If you’re going to cool one building, it should be a hospital. It wouldn’t even be that big a stress to the grid. Just suffering for the sake of suffering.
Thanks. Yeah, I’ve heard quite a few people were upset at the German greens, in particular, for this reason.
I want to emphasise that they’re not the only ones to blame, I do think they get scapegoated a bit too much sometimes. Insurgentrat in this thread does a good job explaining all the other reasons
Which country are you talking about. I think each needs it’s own investigation.
The German media was extremely critical of Habeck for subsidiesing ACs and “sabotaging his own goals”.
Rooftop solar is a pretty straightforward solution to the energy need of ACs at least outside cities.
The German greens were also not the ones that rushed the nuclear exit.
I said “partly” because now a lot of environmentalist ideas are pretty mainstream.
I’m most familiar with the Netherlands and Germany, a little bit of Belgium.