WHAT is that guy talking about? Not all AC units are a single piece that needs to be mounted on a window, that's just the standard in the US. The mini-splits are the standard elsewhere, they come in two pieces and can be mounted anywhere on the wall. Indoor unit inside (the evaporator),
outdoor unit outside (the condenser), and you just drill a hole for the hose and cables.
There, problem solved. German windows have nothing to do with it. In places where AC units are uncommon, they are simply mostly unnecessary, or mostly unaffordable. Of course, the way climate is going, they are becoming less and less "unnecessary".
Meanwhile, there does appear to be some resistance to AC adoption. Some of it is for dumb reasons (aesthetics, "I'm not used to it so it's bad"), but there are also good reasons. By design, an AC unit cools an indoor space by emitting heat outside. There's no way around it. Add to that the energy consumption, and it's clear that a sudden large-scale adoption would make the streets hotter, and climate change worse. But that's for the long term. In the short term, people are already dying, so something's gotta give.
Topical example: one summer in the '80s, there was a freak heat wave in Greece, with many hundreds of casualties. At the time air conditioning was almost unheard of, and most people didn't even have electric fans. Well the fans immediately disappeared from all the stores because everyone bought one, and AC units started selling, and by now they are common. Not ubiquitous, but many residences have them, and at least public buildings and such are guaranteed to have them. Necessity conquers all. It would of course be better to do the necessary thing BEFORE the mass casualties. If only we could somehow predict them. :/
I think everyone should come to terms with the fact that AC is becoming necessary, and quickly equip, at the very least, public buildings and public transport, and any place where old people go. But also, ideally, we should be already making plans to radically rethink:
work hours and labour rights
and rebuild cities from the ground up if that's what it takes. Because this is an emergency, and AC units alone won't cut it – they're a strain on the power grid, and they fail when it fails, and they can only improve indoor spaces. Tools at our disposal: trees, running water, roofed walkways, atriums, patios, fabric stretched from roof to roof to shield the streets from the sun, narrow streets, optimal orientation of streets and buildings and windows for better shade, materials science and technology, the careful study of tropical and subtropical architecture and urban planning, etc.
And we should absolutely rethink labour, because the bad outcome is already happening, and people who work in air-conditioned spaces are more or less fine, but those who work in spaces without AC are not, and if they're doing manual labour in the heat or out in the sun they're fucked. People are dying because they are forced to work in the heat. This is not acceptable, and if we blithely keep calm and carry on with our current labour laws and schedules, it will get unfathomably worse.
