I'm not European; I come from a tropical island country that is also in love with air-conditioning. I dislike it and prefer natural cool air.

At home, it recycles stale, dry air. In urban settings, air-conditioners pump hotter air into the (already) sizzling outside. There are better implementations like district cooling with cold water, but this will require ripping out every single split-aircon unit from every single flat and replacing the ducting, the cooling units, and even the controls.

This is a really interesting point that I don't think gets enough attention, so I'll call it out: in general, it takes less energy to air condition than to heat because the differentials are greater -- meaning: it's easier to air condition from 45 to 25c than it is to heat from -5 to 25c, simply because 45 - 25 < 25 - -5.

The perception might be that air conditioning is used excessively and the same arguments are used for excessive heating. I know 2 countries in Europe in one winter heating targets 23 Celsius inside for outside temperatures of 5 Celsius in average and in another winter heating targets 19 Celsius inside for outside temperatures of 10 Celsius in average.

Governments try to explain everybody they should use less heating, and I personally find comfortable (and reasonable) smaller differences between outside and inside.

Now, when I was in a country with what I think is excessive air conditioning (not middle east, but no use to name it) it annoyed me the huge difference, 38 Celsius outside and 21 Celsius inside.

I will complain about large differential no matter the country. Of course it might limit the activities I can make in some parts of the world (skiing in the desert anybody?), but that's what I find reasonable.

> I see the argument that air conditioning is somehow “wrong” or “unsophisticated” on HN all the time (usually from Europeans) and it’s one of the weirdest things. I see no explanation for it other than racism.

I do not see that. In this thread it is making the point that the cities are extremely expensive to run and not sustainable. I see the same point made about desert cities in the US.

European cities may need heating, but they also tend to have far better supplies of water, better government, and a far more diversified economy. White elephant projects are at least challenged and discussed and are rarely (if ever) on this scale. Even something like Britain's much maligned HS2 is far smaller in absolute cost (maybe by an order of magnitude depending on whose estimates of each you believe), and even more so relative to the population size of the economy.