Record heat waves illuminate plight of poorest Americans who suffer without air conditioning

The state of America, what a joke.

USD100 billion sent to Ukraine by the U.S. and pocketed by corrupt politicians there, in Europe, and the U.S. sure could have bought a bunch of A/C units for poor Americans!

Come to Japan, they'll teach you how to survive summer without air conditioning, and hopefully survive the heatstroke in the process.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/01/teenager-among-15-heat-related-deaths-as-japan-and-south-korea-swelter

quote: About one in 10 U.S. households have no air conditioning.

95%+ of UK households have no air conditioning.

In heat waves, I put cardboard up at the windows to stop the sun heating the air in the rooms and only cook with a microwave or an electric steamer. It's cooler to sleep downstairs on a damp towel.

Fans only blow air over your skin, although that offers some relief. Keep an evaporative air cooler supplied with ice cubes or ice packs if you have one.

Thankfully we got lucky in the last month with cooler, wet weather.

Look at the pictures of the housing; the construction is wholly inappropriate for a hot climate. These people have lived in an area with hot summers which now are getting hotter but have never adapted their building methods to suit the climate.

There are methods used for millennia by people in very hot areas of the world but rather than adapting to their environment they seek to install a temporary, energy inefficient, carbon generating heat pump that just displaces the heat to their general environment making the overall problem worse and massively increasing the carbon footprint that is the underlying cause of the increasing heat.

GBR48, you need to put something light reflecting in the windows to redirect the heat outwards. We found the white lining to our curtains proved very effective in doing that last year, having replaced all the bulbs with LED they produced no noticeable increase to the heat when on and massively reduced the energy consumption. Just wish we could have painted the roof and brick walls white!

And a lot of these people are living in houses with multiple rooms while the elderly in Japan are living in 1k apartments with AC they don’t use and die of heatstroke because they can’t afford the electricity bills with their measly pensions.

Go and live more North then.

We built our house using passive house techniques.

We don't have AC and are still coping with this summer in relative comfort.

Relying on natural air flow and good insulation is also much healthier compared to having all the windows closed and AC on most of the time.

zones2surfToday 07:26 am JST

USD100 billion sent to Ukraine by the U.S. and pocketed by corrupt politicians there, in Europe, and the U.S. sure could have bought a bunch of A/C units for poor Americans!

Yeah because that sounds like a totally reasonable government program. I swear, the apologists are just copy pasting at this point regardless of whether it makes any sense.

Look at the pictures of the housing; the construction is wholly inappropriate for a hot climate. These people have lived in an area with hot summers which now are getting hotter but have never adapted their building methods to suit the climate.

It is not the tropics. The elevation is around 1,600 - 1.700 meters. Summers are not normally not that hot at that altitude and winters are brutal. Winter cold is more of a driver of the building codes in that region than summer heat.