I’ll answer your question first, but I have some issues with the framing you’re using around that question. The two other main methods of practical temperature management available to us are evaporative cooling and geothermal. Your body has a built-in evaporative cooling mechanism called sweat. Fans take advantage of this. But not everyone has equally effective bodies for this, not all climates are particularly effective for it (high humidity makes it extremely ineffective) and not everyone finds it comfortable for their situation. Swamp coolers are a different form of evaporative cooling that move the evaporation process onto a substrate which then cools things down with a fan. You can also find natural evaporative cooling working for you in many places, for example around large bodies of water. There is an externalized cost here if you’re trying to make evaporative cooling work in an environment that’s unsuitable for it, and the cost of fresh water is a significant line item on the energy budget too. Don’t neglect that by assuming evaporative cooling is a clear win that is automatically preferable to an air conditioner. All these evaporative solutions share the reality that they’re going to add (often very significant amounts of) humidity to the air. Air conditioning on the other hand can actually remove humidity from the air, and is one of the few practical methods of doing that. It’s solving the issue in a different way, but it’s a significant and important difference.

The other option is geothermal. This is genuinely underutilized today and I think we can certainly save a lot of energy budget by accessing stable and susprisingly comfortable temperatures underground basically year-round. Geothermal heat pumps (which use air conditioning technology) are by far the most practical way of doing this in our current situation, but older solutions involving buildings that are deeper in the ground or that have airflow going through the ground can provide access to this temperature too – with the caveat that you’ll often run into problems with water, flooding, or condensation/mold unless you’re in a particular sort of environment where this is not a concern.

As for the framing: You have to look at it systemically I think. We do a lot of things that seem dumb on the surface, and sometimes they are dumb, but more often they are making tradeoffs for particular reasons and a lot of times those turn out to be the right tradeoffs, there’s just a lot of complexity to the system that you’re glossing over. You can certainly argue those reasons, and try a different path, as long as you understand them first. Some of the reasons might be invalid or the tradeoff might not be the right trade, but I don’t see the benefit in making blanket value judgements without understanding what they are and why they’re happening. But I think you’ll find it more challenging than it seems to come up with a better solution in the long run.

What is your specific objection to air conditioners? Temperature is a huge line item on any energy budget, and it has to be managed somehow. There are few places on the planet where humans can live year-round without some form of temperature management, and quite often that requires energy. Firewood is not always a given and not perfectly sustainable at least the way we use it. An air conditioner is not propaganda it is a tool, and you have to figure out if it’s the right tool for the job but that’s never going to be a binary true/false. I think saying you’re “completely opposed” to them and calling them propaganda might be blinding yourself to what the actual goal is and what tools you can use to get there.

Using an air conditioner to live in a hot place is, at least as I understand it, still more energy efficient than using any kind of heater or even a heat pump (which is just an air conditioner in reverse) to live in a cold place, and hot places also have more readily available sources of other energy, typically, so this is not necessarily the wrong choice as transmitting energy long distances is not always a good call either. But you have to understand the tradeoffs you are making. This is why it might seem like propaganda, but it might just be that someone’s done the math and come out to this answer. If you are looking at different numbers, or missing some of those numbers, you might come to a different conclusion, but the air conditioner itself is not the problem, the disagreement in the numbers and the context you are putting those numbers is going to be the root cause you need to figure out.