Do we dare to question how smart it is/was to locate gigantic cities and sprawling suburbs containing millions of people in them in the middle of deserts? Especially when people living there can't conceive of doing so without deeply cooled artificial environments and pools in every yard?

People lived in the deserts long, long before AC, just not in huge numbers.

Perhaps its time to get out of the kitchen if you can't take the heat. And the heat is going to be increasing considerably.

"can we replace tens of $Trillions worth of perfectly good structures overnight (and tear-down historic buildings as well)? I don't think so."

Agreed. That's why I mentioned retrofits. But even that is going to be a hefty bill.

There are cheaper ways to do it--spray on insulation--but it leaves a surface that people describe as like "living inside a tennis ball"--not everybody's cup o' tea. But then perhaps a tennis ball is better than an oven, a freezer, or ... a coffin?

Here in N. Nevada, we have record low humidities. Last year I think it was measured at 4%.
In these dry areas AC is pretty much extravagant, because the lowly evaporative cooler (swamp cooler) works so well.
Ours will drop the temperature as much as 25 degrees below ambient (that's with wood-straw pads, not artificial which work less well.)
I'm guessing the swamp cooler uses 1/3 the energy of AC, but am not sure.
The disadvantages are they do use water, need new pads every so often, and must be drained in winter.
During summer, it turns on very early in the morning via a simple timer, and keeps the house quite cool until mid-afternoon.
On really hot nasty days we do supplement it with small window AC units, and also use them when the humidity rises too much.
An of course we open windows in the cooler evenings to get that cold night air into the house.
We've made thermal curtains for our windows, and use these summer and mostly winter.
We really should make some shutters for our West facing windows, as it seems that is the most heat-introducing area.
Outside shutters keep the heat from getting into the glass.

My kid had a large sliding patio door facing west with no trees or shade in his little condo. I calculated that his heat gain in the afternoon was about the same as having a 1500 W electric heater on in the house. We put up a bamboo type shade on the outside of his window and it greatly helped.

A friend has a stall in a large windowed building and sells antiques. He says the AC goes all day during summer, and suggested to the managers that they install a ceiling exhaust fan(s) to get rid of that tremendous heat at night, and get that cool air inside.
They don't want to spend the money to put in such a system, but instead are willing to pay those huge summer power bills.
Being handy, he offered to put a system in, but still they don't want to outlay the money....
Now perhaps he should approach them again and say, "listen, I'll put the system in, and pay for it upfront, if you will give me half of the savings over the next (undetermined) amount of time." He could probably make a handy profit, and help our collective energy use.

IMHO, the solutions are building underground and bermed, planting deciduous on south walls, painting roofs white, and using nighttime cooling.
And of course liberal use of swamp coolers if your area is suited for it.
Swamp cooler are a great assist to existing AC systems.
They'll allow using AC as an assist, instead of vice-versa.

Great replys here, thanks, I learned a bunch.

A BTU saved is a BTU earned.

I am new to posting comments but have greatly enjoyed reading the Oil Drum for quite some time. I live in Tucson and often hear the comment that large cities should not be built in hot deserts. But as Paul alludes to, from a heating/cooling perspective it is not clear why it would be better to build a large city in Minneapolis, Chicago or Edmonton. I'd be interested in links to studies that quantitatively analyze the average total energy of heating/cooling as a function of latitude. But in any case, perhaps the more pertinent issue with Tucson, Phoenix and Las Vegas is how we use our limited water resources.

Correction. Refrigerators do not consume as much electricity as A/C.