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.
Heat pumps are literally MAGIC.
Last week, in response to another article, I suggested that we may be enjoying laughing at European A/C attitudes from afar partly because Americans are just looking for a political argument they can have on the merits. We can watch Europeans culture-war over air conditioning and — not having been part of *that particular* culture war — we can be the rationalists in the corner.
Meanwhile here, as you noted, the administration’s policies aren’t defensible under even the most climate-skeptic assumptions — they’re just insane. So there’s no point in even trying to argue it. Not many of us are versed in the art of propaganda and pure power politics — we were taught that persuasion matters. So now that persuasion mostly doesn’t matter at home, we look elsewhere to kibbitz just to scratch that itch, that fantasy that convincing people of *something* might matter to *anything*.
But I want to focus on a point you breezed over: “heat pumps”. Everyone should know this term and repeat this term. Heat pumps, *heat pumps*, **heat pumps**!
Because, honestly, heat pumps are the closest thing to magic human technology has ever produced.¹ I’m a little biased here; I grew up in coastal North Carolina, almost the optimal spot for the heat pumps we were making over fifty years ago, so for me they’re much more normal than furnaces or boilers (are those the same things, even? I have no idea because I’ve never thought about them!).
Heat pumps are just bidirectional air conditioners. If the house is hot in the summer, you pump heat out from the house and dump it into the outside air;² when the house is cold, you pump heat out from outside (even “cold” air physically contains immense heat) and into the house to warm it up. That’s all, they really aren’t any more complicated conceptually than air conditioners or refrigerators. Just “AC in reverse”.
The magic part is this: heating a home with a heat pump allows you to get efficiencies *greater than 100%*. That’s not funny Trumpy math, like a 200% cut in drug prices; you can actually, literally, get more heat out of a heat pump than the energy you get from the electrical mains to run it. Because the electricity isn’t being used like in a toaster to directly heat your home; it’s being used to run the heat pump to get all that latent heat from the cold air outside and stuff it into your cozy house where you want it.
It was doing this in climes like the one I grew up in since the 1950s, and at real residential scale fifty years ago. But heat pumps get less efficient the greater the “heat gradient” (basically, the difference between the desired inside and actual outside temperatures). Worse, when efficiency drops below a certain point they can’t continue to do the job heating at all — they can get the inside temperature up from 20°F to 50°F, perhaps, but no higher — and have to fall back on “backup resistive heating” — which are just coils like in space heaters or toasters, and those cost a fortune to run compared to a furnace.
Until fairly recently, many parts of the country (more or less, the ones where snow stays on the ground in the winter) had winters that fell into that zone where heat pumps just couldn’t do the job. Once a heat pump needs to run its backup heating regularly, or its overall efficiency is below the furnace’s, it’s more efficient to just use a one-way air conditioner and a separate traditional heating system.
But that’s no longer the case nearly everywhere in the U.S. Not because of climate change.³ It’s because heat pumps have gotten so much better that they now beat the efficiency of traditional fossil-fuel-based heating systems even in all but the most extreme cold outside temperatures. (And these days, that really means *cold*. You live in Minnesota? There’s a heat pump most every manufacturer makes for you.)
So instead of installing two systems — one (the one-way heat pump we call an “air conditioner”) to cool in summer, another (a furnace) to heat in winter — you just need one. It’s fully electric, so no more tanks to refill or gas lines to leak.
And once again, at optimal temperatures, they’re *magic*. Even if your power plant runs on fossil fuels, you’re getting more heating out of each gram of gas or oil the plant is burning than you would if you just burned it yourself in the furnace. And unlike the furnace, it can run on wind, solar, or geothermal.
And heat pumps are getting smarter and learning new tricks. Have you seen those fancy induction burners that have batteries so you can get a wok blazing hot with just the power of an electric outlet — they pre-charge the battery then dump it along with the wall power when needed? Innovators are doing similar things with heat pump water heaters: the heat pump heats the water only to its sweet spot — the temperature where you’re still getting those >100% efficiencies; then if that’s too hot, it mixes in cold water, if that’s too cold, it fires up the electric battery (charged at off-peak times via smart-grid tech) to push the water up a few more degrees.
Ground-source heat pumps — where instead of using ambient air, pipes are drilled into the earth for much steadier and more efficient heat exchange — were long too pricey and space-hungry for most homes; the easy customers were huge users like factories and stadiums with land to spare. But small versions that just need a spot of backyard are getting cheaper and cheaper, too, and are now cheap enough in some places to pay for themselves in a matter of years. (The toughest part today can be finding a qualified installer who can fit you on their overpacked schedules!)
And, just one more time: they’re frigging *magic devices* you can have in your home! Who doesn’t want that?⁴
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¹ And I write that as a former Googler, a computer techie who temperamentally eschews anything that, you know… *exists,* out in icky meatspace!
² Or increasingly these days and even more efficiently, into the ground. This part is just what we usually call “air conditioning”. And in case you’re wondering: no, this heat-dumping isn’t a climate problem — you’re moving heat, not making it, and the dab of new heat from running the machine is a rounding error next to the sun. What people mean when they say AC worsens climate change is the emissions from the electricity — which is real, and which is precisely the case for heat pumps: wring more comfort from each kilowatt, then clean up the kilowatts.
³ Not *only* because of climate change.
⁴ People get really worked up “well, actually”’ing on heat pumps, so I stand ready for your… erm… “corrections”. These days though, the arguments are really on the margins, and a return of subsidies would put most of even those marginal objections to rest.
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.