Green - An environmentalist community

Still ancient thinking. The real new hotness is pumping heat around to where it's needed, and storing it in a heat tank when it's not. Heat pumping is incredibly efficient. Need to cool down a room? Pump it into the heat tank. Need to cook some food? Pump it into the stovepot. Done with the oven? Pump the excess heat back to the tank. Need a hot shower? Pump!

One thing that I think could be interesting with air conditioning and load balancing is using the air in homes and buildings to shift peaks and make more efficient use of base load power where available. If there's a bunch of solar power in the early afternoon or wind or nuclear in the middle of the night, it could make sense to cool buildings down further than normal, say instead of just 78 F you cool when there's excess energy down to 68 or 70 F. Then there's less need to run those air conditioners when there's lots of other demand, especially if you insulate well. The nighttime cooling even has the added bonuses of the refrigeration cycle being more efficient over a smaller temperature gradient and many people preferring cooler sleeping temperatures.

What needs to be rethinked is the heating systems on first world countries.

USA, Canada, and Europe burned the world down to keep it hot, and now will try to stop the hot countries from using air conditioners?