The article states "Even as power plants burned more coal to provide the power needed to keep people cool, the country experienced a nationwide electricity shortage.", so AC units aren't going to solve the problem.
Heatproof shelters aren't solving the problem. If you assume the hypothetical impact on well-being to a billion human beings, and potential deaths of 100-300 million human beings, what kind of physical scale are we looking at to shelter a billion human beings assuming one shelter every x km? It's about on a par with only equipping a large commercial airliner with a single oxygen mask.
How about the materials required? The scale of manufacturing? The impact of the manufacturing on the environment? The impact of shipping and installing them on the environment?
It would sooner make sense to create underground cities, but that's no small endeavour.
> How about the materials required? The scale of manufacturing? The impact of the manufacturing on the environment? The impact of shipping and installing them on the environment?
So we don't have the competence or resources to directly help people with heat waves but we have the competence & resources for a bigger than Manhattan Project scale effort for climactic scale projects such as carbon capture & moving humanity underground?
Perhaps there's some already invented devices which can cool a dwelling?
Infrastructural changes always sound scary and impossible, and I am in no way saying one solution is the best or indeed going to work. But good questions maybe, which is why I am saying innovation is required. Changing our way of life is possible though, say when people switched to cars from carriages or when we switched to electricity and laid out the various grid systems. Asking people to move north is not going to cut it or be enough. When a technology is useful or practical or helpful, making the switch is easier.
