Electricity is pricey here, and it can be tough to negotiate with your landlord to take the window out and properly secure an ac unit.

Besides, offices, shopping malls, gorvernment buildings... none of them usually have ac.

I hate walking in my town‘s Rathaus it’s always so hot and stuffy in there. I don’t know how the people working there real with it all summer long. And it’s a brand new building too.

You don't understand Switzerland. More people rent in Switzerland than elsewhere. Switzerland also has an oceanic climate and usually doesn't have hot summers. AC units aren't a thing in Switzerland, however this is changing slowly.

> surely you can afford to install an AC unit

Lots of people rent and they can't install AC.

Lots of buildings in Europe are somewhat old and have controls over what you can or can't do with them (I live in England in a property that was built in 1820 and is gradeII listed, which means we're restricted on the kind of work we can do without getting permissions). The age of the buildings also means that AC is harder to install (getting ducting installed can be really difficult) and is less efficient. I have single-pane sash windows with large gaps.

In England there are 22m households. Domestic heating is a significant source of CO2. Adding aircon on top would be pretty concerning.

There's a lot of poor quality housing built in the 1970s and 1980s that should be knocked down and rebuilt, and if we did that we could have much better insulation, and shutters over windows, and so on. But this is hard to do.

I don't know how effective they are, but there are floor AC units where all you have to do is stick the heat output tube out a window.

I’m grateful AC are frowned upon in Europe. Putting a band-aid by consuming even more energy is insane in large scale, with the perverse effect of hiding the problem and delaying awareness.

Heating freezing temperatures to livable takes more energy than air conditioning. Logically, we should frown upon living in cold places with extended winter more than we frown upon living in places that require air conditioning.

Sure, I‘m not debating AC vs Heating, but that installing AC alone in the majority of the millions of European homes that don’t have it because it’s starting to get too hot in the summer is not only not a solution to the general problem but can have perverse short term effects. My point about being grateful is that I hope it’ll push more awareness and starting action now, compared to the US where prevalent AC might hide the issue longer. But that’s just a thought.

AC literally saves lives. Calling an invention that prevents thousands of deaths a year a bandaid seems kind of callous to me.

I’m talking AC in the context of large scale deployment in whole regions, not specifically for people with health problems and/or elderly.

It's not just the sick and elderly who die of heatstroke

AC has the unfortunate side effect of accelerating climate change.

Heating does as well. Perhaps the Swiss should forgo that too. They are some of the richest people on Earth, having benefited more than most from the fossil fuel age. Remember, Russian oil oligarchs, Saudi oil barons, and all other anonymous nasty fossil fuel producers have parked their money in Switzerland for a very long time.