Air Conditioning is AMAZING. We Should Do It Better.
Europe makes it too hard to install A/C. But the U.S. makes it too hard to power A/C with clean energy.
THIS MAY BE THE HOTTEST summer you remember. And yet—unfortunately for our planet—it may still be the coolest summer for some time.
A heatwave cooked much of Europe this past week, breaking records and claiming lives. France alone recorded a thousand excess deaths over a four-day period, with 85 percent of the deaths occurring among the elderly population. High temperatures, which surpassed 104 degrees, also shuttered schools in the U.K., ravaged crops in Spain, derailed train cars in Sweden, and melted roads across Germany.
Now a “heat dome” is scorching America’s East Coast just ahead of the country’s 250th birthday. Even our northern neighbors in Canada haven’t been spared, with Ontario (Ontario!) reaching 99 degrees.
So let me just say what should be obvious: Thank God for air conditioning, one of the greatest achievements of modern civilization.
Indoor cooling is sometimes portrayed as an indulgence. In reality, it is critical infrastructure, necessary for both public health and human flourishing. The ability to tame the heat, at least indoors, allows students to learn more and score better on tests. It enables workers to be more productive, and consumers to enjoy leisure year-round. It is what allowed lithographers a century ago to first reliably print in color, and enables other industries to produce food and electronics. It has transformed architecture, entertainment, sports, medicine, and virtually every other field you can imagine.
If this sounds obvious . . . well, it isn’t to much of Europe. There, environmentalists, architectural preservationists, and de-growthers have fought the spread of air conditioning.
Switzerland doesn’t outright ban A/C, but some areas make it functionally impossible to install cooling in your own home, sometimes requiring documentation of a demonstrated medical need. In Paris, even disabled residents must persuade first their neighbors and then local officials to allow them access to cooling units, lest they blemish the city’s architectural aesthetics.1 Londoners are being forced to remove existing A/C units if they can’t prove they had first tried ceiling fans, open windows, and other forms of “passive cooling” before installing “active cooling” as a last resort.2
Even some cardiac wards in German hospitals don’t have A/C, meaning that heart-surgery patients in Düsseldorf are expected to recuperate in temperatures above 100 degrees.3
To some extent, I can see the logic: Climate change is an existential risk, and we want to reduce carbon emissions wherever possible. Perhaps it feels particularly immoral or reckless to respond to the (deadly) discomfort caused by man-made carbon emissions by installing appliances that can lead to even higher man-made carbon emissions.
But Europeans are not nearly so abstemious (or judgmental) about access to life-saving indoor heating as they are to access to indoor cooling. Access to heating is nearly universal in Europe, despite heat also drawing energy, because the societal conclusion was that no one deserved to freeze to death. A symmetrical conclusion about boiling to death seems more than reasonable, particularly as efficient, dual-purpose technologies (like heat pumps) hit the market.
And besides, what matters more than whether your indoor thermostat is artificially moving temperatures up vs. down is where the energy used to power the system is coming from. As long as the generation of that energy is clean, efficient, and abundant, who cares?
Alas, here is where we smug, A/C-enjoying Americans have kind of lost the plot.
IN THE UNITED STATES, nearly 90 percent of homes have some sort of air conditioning, versus only about 20 percent in Europe. Americans often make fun of Europeans for not having A/C, but meanwhile we’re blocking the energy developments that would make the use of our air conditioners more affordable.
The Trump administration announced this week that it was canceling yet another offshore wind development. This project, which was planned for off the coast of North Carolina, was expected to produce 1.6 gigawatts of wind energy, which is enough to power 375,000 homes. Its termination follows the cancelation of hundreds of millions of dollars in other offshore wind leases (in New York, Maine, and California) just a couple of weeks ago, which would have powered some 3 million homes.
You can add these developments to the blocking of many, many more projects for offshore wind (including some where the Trump administration has agreed to pay billions of dollars to companies to get them to walk away), onshore wind, and utility-scale solar. Plus the repeal of lots of Biden-era incentives intended to encourage greater investment in renewable technologies and insulation upgrades.
At best, Donald Trump has created uncertainty around clean-energy investment; at worst, he has deliberately killed off projects that could help meet growing electricity demand—including demand for the air conditioning that has become increasingly necessary in a warming world.
And to be clear, the problem isn’t only Trump, or even his party. In deep blue states, NIMBYist, protectionist forces have blocked or delayed promising renewable development. Meanwhile Texas is far and away the country’s leader in renewable energy.
That is partly because Texas has abundant wind and solar resources to harness. As the state demonstrates, the potential around renewables is often neatly aligned with the demand for cooling: Places that get very hot also tend to get a lot of sunshine, which can be used to power the systems that keep indoor spaces livable.
But building out the infrastructure to take advantage of that alignment requires something more basic than ideology or geography. It requires regulatory flexibility and political will—both of which remain in short supply on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ramparts
— Speaking of a keep-it-in-the-ground ethos: The Strategic Petroleum Reserve’s oil inventories just fell to their lowest level since 1983 because Trump has been drawing down the reserve to blunt the price impact of his war with Iran. You may recall Trump and his cabinet heavily criticizing the last president for draining the reserve for political reasons.
— The clock for the USMCA trade agreement started ticking Wednesday. Negotiators for the United States, Canada, and Mexico officially met to start talks about whether or not to renew the trade deal that Trump signed during his first term, which back then he called “the best trade deal ever made.”
— Rihanna is suing the Trump administration for a tariff refund. She certainly has the right theme song for the litigation.
— Here’s how the data-center buildout could spark a third wave of inflation.
— It’s good to be the president.
— Wake up, babe. A new top-10 fear just dropped.
To the extent French opposition to A/C is grounded in climate concerns, it’s a bit silly, since already only a small share of French electricity generation comes from fossil fuels. That’s thanks primarily to nuclear.
The contingent of the British population most vulnerable to heatstroke—the elderly—is especially unlikely to have indoor cooling; just 3 percent of the U.K. population over age 75 has A/C, compared to 4.6 percent of the country overall.
We have 7 splits and in our house. Three bedrooms, the family room, front room, and two more in the basement. There were decades we didn’t need that in Seattle, but we do now. So we spent a ton to have it done, but it was 1000% worth it.
Air conditioning is responsible for the population growth in the southern states.