This is both a shower thought and a stupid question but I think it fits this community better.
Since air conditioning is apparently heating the local environment while cooling down a house I was asking myself whether it would be possible to basically either build a layer of glass/plexiglass right over the actual outer structure of a house, leaving a tiny gap between wall and glass, or at least put a house in a kind of glasshouse dome with a double glass wall. And consequently inject a sulfur compound, calcite etc into that “gap”, basically creating a very tiny micro-atmosphere that has that sun blocking effect.
Would that work, just logically/technically? Would the environment heat up less, more, or just the same as with geoengineering in the stratosphere? Would it even cool down a house/keep it cool at all?
From your description, this sounds a lot like how double/triple pane windows work, or like a Trombe wall. Although a Trombe wall is meant to heat a home, vents could be used to take advantage of convection currents that shed the heat away from the house.
That said, this wouldn’t necessarily be cooling per-se, but would be avoiding heat gain. And at that point, any material that’s loosely coupled to then house would be equally effective, like a wall with studs 24" (60 cm) apart rather than the USA standard of 16" (40 cm).
In fact, this is how some homes with massively overhanging roofs manage to passively keep themselves manageable in the summer, since the overhang blocks direct sunlight from reaching the walls and windows at summer’s high noon, but lets light in when the sun is lower in winter. Soffit vents let convection currents flow up the inside of the roof, exiting at a ridge vent. So the idea is sound and already deployed in relevant climates.