General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The World's Largest Solar Plant Started Creating Electricity Today [View all]hunter
(38,311 posts)Even here in the USA.
Lack of energy is not the problem. Inequality of wealth is.
Homes can be built or modified so they require very little heating or cooling. I happen to live in a mild climate where heating and cooling are not necessities. My parents and a few siblings live in places where people don't even bother to buy much glass because shutters and screens will do. They don't have heat or AC. Nevertheless, there are people in Scandinavian nations living in well insulated homes where normal day-to-day human activity is enough to keep their homes comfortably warm, even without district heating.
AC? That could be local solar. Ice is easy to make and store. Or maybe you put pipes deep in the ground and use heat pumps.
My only agreement in your list is clothes dryers and refrigerators. My wife likes her clothes dryer and her refrigerator. I've lived without either, as a kid and as an adult. From laundromat to wash your clothes in a tub and hang them on trees, and everything in between.
My parents are basically artists and natural philosophers (modern term: scientists.) Whatever else they happen to be doing for money that ought to explain everything.
I do confess washing machines and clothes dryers are much easier. I have the money, I use them myself.
I still don't care about refrigerators. The dogs will eat any leftovers that won't keep until breakfast. If the dogs don't eat it, then we have a compost heap. My wife's opinion is to keep the refrigerator. She's paid and pays for it, what can I say? No, hell no, there is no strict accounting for anything in our household but there it is. I can live without a refrigerator, she'd rather not.
I think as a kid and young adult I was fortunate to live well outside the boundaries of any conventional middle or upper class U.S.A. "comfort zone." It's been my very great privilege in life to be an ordinary person of this earth.