If heat is energy, why isn’t it possible to genereate electricity out of thin (warm) air and by that cooling our atmosphere while generating (nearly) endless energy?
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So you want electricity. In order to generate electricity you need to do work. (spin magnet) If you want to turn heat into work you need heat to flow.
In a simple model you have two heat tanks you either heat one up or cool the other, the point is temperature difference. If you have that, heat starts to flow from the hotter to the colder tank. Then with a machine you can extract some of that heat and turn it into work.
So in order to get work out of heat you need some kind of temperature difference. You can also make cooling machines where you imput work to maintain a cycle and the cycle pumps heat from the colder tank to the hotter like a fridge. A car engine makes fuel ignite and its rapid expansion does work which we transfer to the road through the tyres.
So you need to maintain a temperature difference which either requires you to heat something up or cool something down. Both of them require energy and you can get some of that energy back in the form of work. Heating water to produce steam for instance is pretty efficient cooling something is less efficient.
By the way what warms the air is the Sun (indirectly) so extracting the Sun’s energy directly makes more sense and we are already doing that.
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