Air conditioning is not a moral failure

The case for making air conditioning normal — even in Europe.

As temperatures blew past 100°F in cities across Europe last week, it was difficult to tell what was generating more hot air: the weather or the discourse around the right way to endure it.

On the western side of the Atlantic, the answer was almost uniformly obvious: air conditioning. Just around 20 percent of European households have air conditioning, compared to 90 percent in the US. Even public buildings — including vital ones like schools and hospitals — often go without air conditioning in Europe. Not because they can’t afford them, primarily, but because, for some reason, many people there think there’s something inherently wrong with what the French call “climatisation.”

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The very idea of air conditioning, to many Europeans, is an example of maladaptation, “a false solution that makes the problem worse” — in the words of far-left French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Better to adapt for those very hot days by closing the shutters and blinds during the day, staying in the shade, drinking plenty of water, and maybe planting a tree. Air conditioning? You won’t find that mentioned in many government heat advisories.

What happens when it breaks 100 degrees in Europe

From my (heavily) air-conditioned office in New York, it almost feels like sport to watch the X fights play out, as smug Americans dunk on their European counterparts — did you know you need a doctor’s note to air condition your home in Geneva? — and Europeans, presumably tweeting from inside their darkened chateaus, give it right back. It’s like the World Cup, except World Cup matches actually end.

But the stakes around extreme heat and the lack of air conditioning aren’t funny at all. Europe has more heat deaths per capita than any other continent, and, in 2022, alone, more than 61,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes. Early estimates suggest there were at least 1,000 excess deaths during the three worst days of the heat wave in France last week, with overbooked mortuary owners turning away family members who had lost loved ones to the heat.

The climate crisis is coming for your groceries

The reality is it’s only going to get worse. Europe is already the fastest-warming continent in the world, heating at roughly twice the rate of the global average since the 1980s. More than two-thirds of Europe’s most severe heat waves since 1950 have come since 2000, and, by 2050, about half the continent’s population could face high or very high heat-stress risk every summer. And while Europe has taken climate change more seriously than any other region, the next 20 plus years of warming is largely locked in, meaning that Europe alone can’t mitigate its way out of ever more intense heat waves. It has no choice but to adapt.

And adaptation will require air conditioning — full stop. There is no technology more effective at turning a deadly heat wave into a survivable one. But, for that to happen, both sides of the Atlantic need to shed the political and cultural baggage they’ve loaded onto AC units. Air conditioning is not the moral failing Europe imagines, nor the emblem of freedom and the good life that America takes it for. Air conditioning is a normal technology — a machine that does a useful job at a manageable........

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