A power station once marked for closure in the town of Bexbach is being resurrected. For the last few years, the plant was in the "grid reserve", meaning it was called upon to supplement shortages in the power network a few days a year.Now, it's one of more than 20 which could come back online full time to help fill the gap left by dwindling energy supplies from Russia.
Michael Lux, the manager at Bexbach, said: "We need energy in Germany, and we need energy in Europe, and there is lack of energy...You don't want to imagine if people have to live in cold houses."

Germany has pledged to totally cut its coal use by 2038, with the government ideally hoping to phase it out by 2030, but the war in Ukraine has forced a temporary resurgence.

JUNE 21, 2012

Air-conditioning is a necessary luxury. For thousands of years before the invention of air-conditioning in 1902, humans survived high heat and humidity by constructing protective shelters and limiting their activity during the hottest times of the year. Air-conditioning puts us in control of our comfort and frees us from the discomfort, risk and uncertainty of the weather.

The availability of air-conditioning allows architects to consider building geometries that were not possible when it was critical that everyone be seated near a window. This allows larger floor plates that encourage collaboration and permit the high densities of our modern cities.

Air-conditioning makes it possible to construct the data centers that power commerce, the Internet and research. Without air-conditioning, we would lose our ability to work and communicate as a modern society.

Air-conditioning makes it possible to comfortably assemble in large groups. Over the past 30 years, the proliferation of sports venues with fixed or operable roofs has changed the way we experience sports and allowed the expansion of professional sports into warmer regions. The Phoenix Cardinals now have an air-conditioned retractable-roof stadium, an indoor oasis that can be cooled below 80 degrees in a climate where the temperatures can exceed 100 degrees. This allowed the team to host preseason and opening weekend home games for the first time since moving to Arizona in 1988.

Engineers are now working on designs that will make it possible for crowds of more than 80,000 people to experience spectator sports in the hot desert sands of the Middle East. (...)
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/06/21/should-air-conditioning-go-global-or-be-rationed-away/air-conditioning-is-crucial-to-modern-life

to warm 

cool down

greenhouse effect 

the demand 
insulation
death rate

a nature-based approach 

to design a building

the heat-island effect 
increase/ reinforce inequalities
the divide between the rich and the poor 

Critics say B.C. (British Columbia)'s current response to heat emergencies is not helpful for vulnerable people. 

Air conditioning units for sale at a Canadian Tire store in Vancouver in June. The province should be working to give air conditioners to help vulnerable people, advocates say. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

B.C. planners and policy analysts say the benefits of air conditioners during extreme heat situations are very clear — and concerns over their environmental and financial impact show misplaced priorities. 

During last year's deadly heat dome in B.C., authorities found over two-thirds of the 619 people that died did not have air conditioning in their homes. 

With extreme heat events more likely in future due to climate change, advocates are asking the province to provide vulnerable people with air conditioning units.

Data shows air conditioner use is already on the rise in B.C., leading to an associated energy and emissions toll — including one instance of the province's public housing authority switching off cooling in some of its properties to save energy.

Our early ancestors avoided the heat by retreating into the cave or the shade of a tree, and engaging in strenuous activity only during the cooler or breezier part of the day. Early vernacular buildings developed using these universal principals, carefully orienting and shading buildings so that they gained heat in winter and were shady in summer, introducing thermal mass in dry climates, and in more humid ones using cross ventilation, porches, shutters, ceiling fans, solar chimneys and insulation.

Air-conditioning made architects and builders lazy. Why use vernacular principles and passive cooling when you can simply build the same box in any climate, face it in any direction, plug an air-conditioner into it, and cool it with money and energy, rather than with natural processes. Air-conditioning uses energy to force indoor air outside, which is expensive and produces greenhouse gases, which warms things up even more. It has made marginally habitable places like Las Vegas and Dubai into energy-gobbling population centers, roasting the planet in the process.

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/06/21/should-air-conditioning-go-global-or-be-rationed-away/air-conditioning-made-architects-lazy

(...) Despite what we assume, (...) individual air-conditioning is terribly ineffective. It works only for those who can afford it. But even then, their use in urban areas only makes the surrounding micro-climate hotter, sometimes by a factor of 10ºF, actively threatening the lives of those who don’t have access to cooling. (The sociologist Eric Klinenberg has brilliantly studied how, in a 1995 Chicago heat wave, about twice as many people died in poor neighborhoods than in a comparable heat wave forty years earlier (...) .) Ironically, research suggests that exposure to constant air-conditioning can prevent our bodies from acclimatizing to hot weather, so those who subject themselves to “thermal monotony” are, in the end, making themselves more vulnerable to heat-related illness.