People don't value design that cools. Most all the spanish style houses you see in California, if you go back to photos from when they were built in the 1920s they all had awnings over all the windows. Those awnings are basically extinct now. Some people are even painting their buildings dark colors. They will chop down shade trees too in a quest for "natural light" aka heat they are now mitigating with a noisy central AC the whole neighborhood gets to listen to now. No one understands cross breeze and opening windows either. Just run up the AC.

By all means install an AC unit to deal with the worst of it. Just install shades as well when you've got the scaffolding out so you can install a smaller, cheaper, and less energy-hungry one.

Unfortunately I personally live in a highrise, and in a rental unit, so that "small hole and a bracket" definitely isn't an option for everyone.

Is this actually illegal in many places? I proposed this to my parents in Germany and they seemed to be under the impression that they could install one but their village is getting a village-wide heat pump system this fall that can also cool in summer, so they are just sitting this summer out as is.

> you just need to let people use AC properly (..) every person in southern Europe should have an AC unit in their bedroom and deaths will go down substantially.

Yes, exactly: install AC where it truly helps and where it is truly needed. That's the point I was trying to make. Most of the rest is solved far more efficient by things like installing shades. In other words: don't go all-out on giant whole-home AC without first stopping the huge inflow of new heat.

> if Europe stopped being so averse to new construction

We're not, there's plenty of new construction over in Europe.

The difference is that European buildings are built to last, so structurally there's no need to tear them down after a couple of decades. They are perfectly usable for another half-century after a minor renovation (including retrofitting AC!), so why destroy a charming historic district for absolutely no reason?

That doesn't mean buildings are never torn down, of course. Right now a lot of post-WWII rental units are being replaced by new construction, as they are architecturally nothing special and renovating them to modern standards is simply way more expensive than replacing them entirely.

> "Another thing that would help is if Europe..."

Europe is a continent with a lot of different countries, all with different laws and regulations. Even the ones who are in the European Union have different rules and regulations.

So please realize that any blanket statements about Europe work as well as making one about the Americas (ie North/South).

Look at the population graph of a city like Las Vegas. It basically didn't exist before the invention of AC.

Window units don't work in most of Europe because our windows aren't compatible with them. If they were, I would have one.

And again, it doesn't solve the core cause. If you want to cool down your home, your first step should be to stop heat from entering. If you can get the same result from €900 of shades and €100 of AC as from €1000 of AC, you'd have to be stupid to go for an energy-guzzling AC-only approach.