Ah, I love that Lee Kuan Yew quote about air conditioning! The man was a true visionary.
It’s honestly crazy to see how European elites are looking at this today. The world has so many weird things that make no sense. I vividly remember a few years back when Trump suggested people drink bleach to cure COVID—right around the time that Flat Earth documentary on Netflix became super popular. Back then, the whole world, including Europe, laughed at America for being so anti-science.
But look at them now. Those same European elites are unironically telling people to rub yogurt on their windows and die in heatwaves just to feel morally superior. I guess every country has its own special way of going crazy.
I have to admit I don’t like the air con to air con to air con chiller feel of Singapore (or Houston) but it sure beats the alternative! - unless I lived in a kampung in flip flops or was a fisherman off Ponggul or something.
I know people who grew up in Singapore without aircon back in the day and they said the mold situation was awful.
Deforestation and increasing urbanization in Asia/SEAsia is a big part of the problem.
I spent a hot season in Thailand in 1993 up in the be-jungled (actually, tropical hardwood forested) hills on the Burmese border, where it was so cold at night I rarely got more than 4-5 hours of sleep. I'd curl up in a ball and shiver.
But 90km away in Bangkok, daytime temps around 120' wouldn't cool until close to dawn.
Cut down the trees, and then watch how well concrete and asphalt work to store heat.
Honestly Noah while the anti-AC views you latch on exist, I think you're builidng something of a small mountain out of a mole-hill in real terms
Much more challenging is the slow / non-adaptation on the energy infrastructure front as well as certain transport infra - as like rail.
French reactors (but also broadly including wider euro generation) having to throttle back because cooling infra set-up is generally set-up on base assumption of "not this hot summers" (and e.g. using river water assumed to be both available - non-drought - and significantly cooler).
Grids that aren't ready for heat.
Evidently it's possible - Iberians are fine (but as is evident they didn't assume a cooler climate as Iberia of course).
The sluggish and more 'throttle usage' instinct versus OMG accelerate infra build now is a deeper and more concerning fundamental than some anti-AC postures (and where honestly I think you vastly over-estimate such views and underestimate degree to which just simply wasn't needed and now mentalities will take a bit to catch-up).
Would you similarly argue that gun deaths in Americas are also a minor problem? That we shouldn't focus on gun deaths cause it's not that big a deal? There are more European heat deaths than American gun deaths. Both are policy problems.
He's not saying the heat deaths arent a problem. He's saying the social opposition to air conditioning isn't as big of an issue as the actual infrastructure having difficulty providing energy.
Really more precisely I was taking aim at the sort of Socio-Political opposition that's posturedin public (as my closing remark "(and where honestly I think you vastly over-estimate such views and underestimate degree to which just simply wasn't needed and now mentalities will take a bit to catch-up)." there's a significant public lag on want/aware of aircon as this has emerged so quickly. T
the actual infrastructure constraints esp. in energy is the Policy angle that's really worrisome more than twits posturing against aircon.
But it WAS a problem, just not as large if one. France alone had 1600 heat deaths in 1990, well before climate change had a significant impact. The entire us has 158 that year.
And the half of America that watches FOX News believes Global Warming is just a giant hoax, so Antifa commies can regulate our God-fearing Fossil Fuel corps. Or somesuch.
That's clearly false though. There is social opposition. Infrastructure concerns didn't cause the French don't make up non-existent medical conditions like "thermal shock". Infrastructure concerns didn't cause German broadcasters to lie about the effectiveness of air conditioning units. To the extent they would have a hard time with the energy requirements in the summer, the lack of social pressure to install air-conditioning means they don't solve the energy infrastructure issues. Furthermore, it doesn't follow that there is energy issues. If they have electricity to run a heat pump in the winter, then they should sill have electricity to run that same heat pump in the summer.
Your capacity to create straw men around statements not made nor implied nor even vaguely connected excepted in overheated excited imagination is quite impressive.
I think this downplays an important factor, which is that temperatures have increased very fast. I'm from Paris, and until quite recently, AC was actually fairly unnecessary: temperatures were moderate the whole year. Now that has changed, the amount of adaptation needed is huge, and one way for our elites to mask their failure to anticipate it is to downplay the obvious technological solutions we failed to adopt.
My bet is that this is very transient. In fact, in France even the most pro-"degrowth" parties are starting to admit that AC is part of the solution.
Agree - the recency (and time limitedness) of the change - and the limited rhetorical façade it's more the rapidity of change that mass-market level people are just beginning to think they need something which wasn't really at all needed before*
AC will be bought, what's more broadly concerning is the lack of real genuine urgency for good infra investment (this is global) on either side of Atlantic for grid etc. (and of course infra-wise like the French nuclear plants - where clearly cooling systems revision is needed [hello too warm river water] as what was once rare clearly won't be]
* (now just hope you don't go for refrigerated offices like US, fuck me I hate that, visiting Euro side office I'm pleased to have office that's not a refigerator where the ladies bring sweaters)
Only a few years ago something like this simply could not have happened. We are talking about the same latitude as Edmonton, Alberta or the southern end of the Hudson Bay. Right now, it simply feels unreal. I very much doubt there's a lot of AC in Edmonton or on the shore of the Hudson Bay. People will react to it eventually, but it's quite human to simply be stunned for a while.
This just isn't true. 2003, 2006, 2007, etc etc etc. 2003 was 23 years ago and killed 10s of thousands. That's a quarter century that they've had to figure this out and almost nothing has changed.
I pointed out elsewhere France alone had 1600 excess deaths from heat in 1990, WAY before climate change was significantly impacting things. The US had 158 that year. Warming may have made things worse recently but this has been a problem for a long time and the solution known.
The story of the 2003 heatwave is actually interesting.
It was a very traumatic event in France and led, among other things, to employees having to work one more day a year for free ("la journée de solidarité") to fund protection measures for the elderly and disabled. I can assure you that making French people work one more day for free without any protest is not "nothing."
But the event was framed as a "once in a century anomaly," and the catastrophe mainly as a societal failure to take care of isolated elderly people and unprepared hospitals (which it was).
My point is that because heatwaves have become more frequent and stronger in the last 5–10 years (they have), the framing will change and lead to the normalization of AC as a form of mitigation.
Culture conversatism is probably the biggest factor in the UK. I mean you have a prominent commentator like Peter Hitchens (brother of Christopher) bemoaning the introduction of central heating and claiming it has ruined society as people no longer sit around a fire as a group. Roger Scruton was another of this kind who thought technology was destroying society, their ideas have more purchase among the population than you think and is a bigger factor than the governments green leanings which are largely derided. The government's policy has more influence on say issues with transport or housing, but buying AC, at least small units is largely an individual decision.
British culture, especially elite British culture has been strongly informed since the late 19th century by a strong romanticist anti-industrial philosophy - although by the late 20th century old industries became part of the nostalgia. I think because Britain was the earliest to industrialise and because it did it in the most brutal and grimiest technological level of the industrial revolution, industry has always been suspect. Cities too - only on Britain compared to other developed countries is inner city a term of abuse, despite having one of the great world cities. People are supposed to aspire to a place in the country. This is a massive factor in the existence of the so called greenbelt, the resistance to new or expanded urban centres or new housing in general via a incredibly restrictive local planning regime that has sent housing to astronomical levels.
On top of that you have a working class culture that sees 'getting above yourself' as a great sin. Spending money above what you should in your class level is looked down on and buying ACs was seen as a luxury good like a flash car. The older generation in general were raised with pretty strict norms on what level of spending were appropriate, what is a waste if money or not and so on.
My bi-Atlantic back-and-forth sense is that habit and conservatism rather than actual policy inclination is much more important and Noah is far too weighting marginal here
Versus spending on infra on the system, that's much more real
I live in Germany and will retrofit my apartment with AC. Having said that, the German ARD picture was framing this topic as a dilemma, not advocating people not to use AC. And the dilemma is real. We constantly have to make trade-off decisions. For instance, I believe that AI will solve really hard problems (like grid congestion), which requires building new data centers which require energy and water. You frequently talk about the folly of degrowth. There is an equal folly of continuing on the economic path we’ve been on without accounting for the damages of the commons. I would love to read your thoughts on what the right balance is here. 200,000 heat deaths were caused by lack of AC, and the heat was caused by our economic growth based (largely) on burning fossil fuels. If the cost was priced in, the markets would drive the needed efficiency and innovation. But the cost is ignored by our system, and is borne by families such as those of the 200000 dead. How do we fix this system? Degrowth is folly. Continuing as we have is also folly.
And if/when Global Warming causes 40m of sea level rise, Europeans won't need to pay for air conditioning in places like Holland or much of the North German coastal plain...because they will be under water.
Not even legendary Dutch hydrological engineering will save them from them from 40m of sea-level rise.
Governments are bad at dealing with externalities, but Germany is particularly bad. Destroying fully functional zero-climate impact nuclear power stations because of irrational fear of radiation and returning to coal is bad, but for the public broadcaster to goad people into suffering (and possibly dying) during a heat wave by claiming air conditioning will cause a possible 0.05° temperature rise 70 years from now is ridiculous. If air conditioning is used only during heat waves it would have an unmeasurable impact on future temperatures. It would be better for all if ARD instead saved energy by shutting down its transmitters and shuttering its studios during the heat wave and stopped sending out bad propaganda.
American in Germany here. Thanks for continuing to highlight this issue. Having grown up with AC, I was shocked when I moved here to find that it’s almost universally absent from people’s homes. There’s certainly an element of cultural conservativism here, but also straight-up nonsense. Radio programs warn people about going into air conditioned stores, warning of temperature shock. By the way, the ARD campaign in Germany is funded by all of here, citizens and non-citizens alike. Imagine getting a bill in the mail from PBS once per quarter. I personally pay about $20 per month to fund these information campaigns, which are clearly political. An earlier comment disputes that, but I’m not convinced. One of the items on the laundry list of the AfD is the promotion of evidently political content via ARD, and I can’t help but sympathize to some extent.
A few years ago, there was a vote in my apartment block to permit someone to install an AC in their u it. It was voted down. One of the arguments was that they’re actually illegal because they’re so loud (which is nonsense, because they’re available for sale). So yes, elites block AC but also regular people vote to limit their own neighbors. And this was an elderly guy looking to install the AC.
Another point I rarely see addressed: many European countries produce an enormous amount of excess electricity in the summer. And that’s a good thing! But somehow this electricity isn’t supposed to be used for AC.
Europe has absorbed an insane amount of American culture over the past 50 years. It’s changed their language, transportation preferences/traffic, computer technology, privacy, work-life balance, diet, school systems, clothing preferences, on and on. I can appreciate some basic need to draw the line somewhere on transitioning completely to an American lifestyle. And that doesn’t take into account the adjustments they have made between European countries to make the EU work.
Of course, the 55pct tax bracket starts at around $90k for an individual in Denmark, so “universal” doesn’t mean “free”. Just means you pay in taxes as opposed to taxes,
Yes, I am very familiar with their definition of universal healthcare and tax policy. You basically pay based on your income and may be able to opt into some private features. The profits and administrative costs are greatly reduced when you don’t have to put up so many incentives plus guardrails to keep people out!
Willis Carrier invented the basis of air conditioning in the early 20th century. He was an American. Surely staying comfortable was a caveman instinct, but doing it with machines has American fingerprints all over it.
Ho about geothermal cooling? That makes more sense than anything involving an increase in the use of fossil fuel generated electricity. And fans! They will typically drop the effective temperature for the body by 5*F.
Yes, I grew up in an old house built into a hillside with no AC…but it was in the countryside surrounded by trees. Climate change has made that much more difficult, and most of modern life is not happening in pre-industrial architecture. The Middle East is becoming dangerously warm, for example.
Brit here. There’s a big gap between policy makers & activists and the population at large on this. Anecdote, but about 25% of people in a large group chat I’m in have bought portable aircon units in the last couple years. I know an increasing number of people who’ve retrofitted aircon into their homes. And a far far greater proportion who are or would consider doing one or other to cool their homes.
So it is changing, but it’s driven by need. Until the last 10 years it was unusual to have any days breaking 30 degrees Celsius (mid 80s) in a year. That’s massively escalated especially in the last 5 years with temperatures in the south hitting high 30s (high 90s/100) most years for at least a few days and having weeks in the high 20s (80s). Add to that our housing stock is way older than US / Canada - the average age of housing in the UK is over 75 years old. 20% of houses were built before the First World War… and because it’s unusual to have aircon, having it fitted and serviced is very expensive. So the northern European stance of avoiding AC until pretty recently made reasonable sense… its expensive to buy and to run, and tricky to fit and only really needed a few days a year why would individuals divert needed money to that over other things…
But the speed our climate changing and frequency of much hotter weather is changing the publics mind. And one way or other they are increasingly voting with their wallets to favour aircon. Even if regulations around new builds are lagging due to political/activist objections. You can’t find any model of portable aircon to buy in the UK this week, all sold out, and waiting times to fit window/central AC have rapidly increased…
Having just endured a second week this year where the inside temperatures in our house have hit 35 degrees (95F) every day, no part of our house has been below 25 (77F) day or night for several weeks, with several more to follow, and routinely sleeping in temperatures above 30 (86F) a portable aircon is on my shopping list as soon as any are in stock again. And when we move house next year I’m 100% getting AC installed…
Fully agree that a green movement focused on degrowth is part of the problem now. Also fully believe it’s self defeating in the end as the vast majority of people will not subscribe to it and will make different choices to protect their living standards and we’d do better to lean into that than trying to push the tide further out…
They don’t call them AC, though, but heat pumps, which may cause confusion and underestimation of AC prevalence. They are typically installed to heat homes more efficiently, saving money, but can be run in reverse to cool homes. They *decrease* CO2 emissions when used to warm homes. It is essentially renewable energy. And because it gets cold during winter even in souther Europe, you probably end up running heat pump for heating much more than for cooling, which is net positive for climate.
The key to bypass cultural obstructions is to avoid the evil American invention ’air conditioning’. It is not AC if it can warm the building. It’s an environmental-friendly heating device that accidentally can cool a home if you are not careful.
Minister 1: we need to do something about people dying of heat in their homes, and we can’t possibly recommend air con, what can we do?
Minister 2: tell them to cover their windows with aluminum foil?
M1: That will make them look crazy, just like the time we suggested tin foil hats for summer walks, not to mention aluminum is very energy intensive to manufacture.
M2: What about painting the windows? Nice whitewashing.
M1: But paints are oil based, and also emit noxious fumes which may also be greenhouse gases. This will also require stripping the paint in the autumn.
M2: Can they just splash on some tomato soup like the Just Stop Oil resisters do to paintings at the museum? That was highly effective!
M1: Hang on, I’m getting a call on line 1 from my contact at Chobani.
One thought reading both the essay and the comments:
I’m not convinced this is primarily a story about culture or ideology.
Most Europeans in the comments seem to be describing something closer to path dependence. A society that genuinely did not need widespread AC for decades built its housing, infrastructure, energy systems, and everyday habits around that reality. Now the environment is changing faster than those systems can adapt.
This makes me wonder whether the deeper issue is not air conditioning itself, but adaptation speed.
At the same time, I wonder whether “Europe” is too large a unit of analysis here. The AC debate itself illustrates the problem. Germans do not represent Spaniards. Parisians do not represent people in Marseille. Northern Europe does not face the same environmental pressures as Southern Europe.
If we look at adaptation through the lens of cities, regions, and globally connected industrial nodes rather than sovereign states, we may reach a different conclusion. What looks like “Europe resisting change” may actually be a highly uneven process in which some nodes adapt rapidly while others remain locked into older assumptions.
Europe and Japan may be confronting a broader challenge: highly successful, highly stable societies often become optimized for preserving existing arrangements. That works well in periods of gradual change, but may become a disadvantage during periods of technological and environmental acceleration.
From that perspective, AC is less a culture-war issue than a small example of a larger question: how quickly can a mature civilization update itself when the conditions that originally shaped its institutions no longer exist?
The future may belong less to countries as unified actors, and more to networks of cities, industries, and supply-chain nodes that can respond most effectively to changing conditions.
Exactly right. We live in Germany. It’s very hot and has been all week. Starting Monday it’s nothing but rain. We Just vacationed in Croatia in an eco resort: our bungalow had split AC. I could say more but Noah is really obtuse and honestly , somewhat ignorant about this.
This is also why I think the AC discussion may be relevant to the coming AI era.
Much of today’s AI debate is framed as competition between sovereign states: Europe versus America versus China. But large language models are only the most visible layer of a much larger industrial ecosystem.
In that sense, AI may not ultimately be about AI companies alone.
A good example is TOTO. Most people think of it as a Japanese toilet and bathroom brand. But through its ceramic expertise, TOTO also supplies electrostatic chucks, a critical precision component used to hold wafers during semiconductor manufacturing. These components matter for processes such as etching, deposition, ion implantation, metrology, and increasingly complex advanced chip production.
So one of the beneficiaries of the AI boom may be a company many people associate with toilets, not neural networks.
This is the point: the AI supply chain is full of hidden nodes. Some are model developers in the US and China. Some are memory-chip manufacturers in Korea. Some are fabs in Taiwan. Some are industrial automation firms in Europe. Some are precision-materials or component companies in Japan.
AC, toilets, and AI may seem unrelated, but they all point to the same issue: modern civilization is not organized neatly around sovereign states or headline technologies. It is organized through layered networks of infrastructure, materials, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and highly specialized industrial knowledge.
From that perspective, the question is not simply whether “Europe” wins or loses AI. The more interesting question is which cities, regions, industries, and supply-chain nodes can adapt, integrate, and create value within the emerging ecosystem.
Most (probably all) hotels I’ve been in in DE have air conditioning. And others have discussed here in the comments that many stores have AC. What’s meant, of course, is the near universal absence of AC in homes in many parts of Europe. That the hotel industry has adapted is beside the poibt.
This is a good post. Doing a repost of a "I remain right" piece like this is always fun.
That said, the exasperated tone of "these idiot Europeans defending a status quo that isn't good for them" is exactly how I felt when you wrote your post a few weeks ago defending for profit health insurance.
The defense wasn't that it saved money, or that it improved patient outcomes. Just that it wasn't the BIGGEST source of costs in the US system.
We're not anti-AC - on the grounds of climate change or anything else. The lack of AC is due not to ideological or regulatory resistance but to far more fundamental factors like available space, housing stock and climate. Our housing stock is old and small compared to the US. Most office and retail outlet new builds and refurbs have AC built in or introduced temporarily for the few weeks of high temperatures we get a year. But in most homes there isn't room to install it permanently.
Not only does the size and age of our housing stock make it far harder to install AC but there is less incentive to install it because the UK and the rest of Europe is simply not as warm as the US is: the US national annual mean temperature is about 11.7°C to 12.7°C.; the UK annual average is 9°C to 10°C; the warmest US month (July) averages 31.2°C, whereas the warmest UK month (July) averages 19.1°C. More widely in Europe only a few southern island micro-climates like Cyprus reach the top US heat tier annually.
And then there's the social and aesthetic considerations. Heat removed from a house has to go somewhere and if you live in the high density housing that's common in Europe, that 'somewhere' will probably be the air that your neighbours breathe. And try fitting an AC unit to the outside of a C18th Georgian townhouse or a mid-Victorian terrace without making it look like a Steampunk art installation.
I can estimate that 99% of homes in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Australia have electricity and running water. And they did not have when homes built still standing and lived in from the 14th century to today.
And it was all retrofit.
I've been to Europe more than 100 weeks of travel over 50 years.
I know, as you know, very very few buildings have original windows. most have been replaced with modern insulated easy opening windows.
Yes, but we need water and electricity. Besides, wires and pipes are fairly easy to add, especially to houses which don't already have wires and pipes in them. Central, permanent AC units aren't as easy to add - you need conduits or pipes much wider than you need for running water.
But the real point is that we don't need permanent AC in domestic dwellings because it's not hot enough here! It may become hot enough for it, but it isn't yet.
And adding modern insulated windows made sense because of the problem that we do have, which is that it's cold for much of the year. Cold and wet. And windows are generally a 'one in, one out' affair. They don't reduce valuable space in the house.
Newly built hospitals in Germany only have AC in the operating rooms, not in patient rooms or recovery areas. How can this be due to the fact that buildings in Europe are old?
If you’re worried about aesthetics and social factors, as you may recall from physics lessons heat rises and does not typically travel horizontally țo your neighbor’s houses. My house has two central air conditioning units and both are behind the house surrounded by walls and thus hidden from view and not very loud and the surrounding area isn’t noticeably warmer. They can also be installed on the rooftops, as is common in urban areas. Do you also worry when heating your house in the winter with a heat pump that you will make the outside air cooler and force that cold onto your neighbors, or maybe instead use an old fashioned fireplace and assault them with smoke and particulates to reduce electricity use?
There's no incentive to overcome whatever the barriers may be to getting permanent AC installed in small houses because we don't need it, because it rarely gets hot enough. Why contort and narrow already restricted spaces for something that you only need a couple of weeks a year, at most?
Every year, when the country finally warms up people think 'maybe I'll get temporary AC for this hot spell'. But by the time we've had a look at what's available online, the weather's back to it's 20 degree average and we don't think about it again for another 12 months.
You don't need physics to get the point. Just a little common sense. The hot air coming out of an AC unit can be a problem for near neighbours in summer because they are likely to open their windows to cool their homes down. The slight cooling effect on the air outside, of a heat pump in winter, doesn't affect neighbours because their windows are very likely closed (and probably double-glazed) to keep the heat in.
This is a non-issue in this country and in most of Europe. And the lack of AC has very little to do with climate change regulations.
/This is not cultural conservativism, Noah. Countries of the former Eastern Bloc are more culturally conservative than those in Western Europe, and politicians don't push this nonsense here.
This stems purely from the Green movement, whose motto is "reduce, reuse, recycle" on everything that eats some resources. You can't reuse or recycle air conditioning (meaning the power spent, not the device), so the only part left is "reduce".
German Greens are extra pronounced in this, a party of teachers (not irony: teachers are overrepresented in Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) whose life mission is to teach and preach aloud to a captive audience, even if the rest of the country is long fed up.
Merkel's CDU used to follow such trends blindly, and VdL is the last vestige of System Merkel still present in top politics, long after her political Mutti lost at the ballot box. Alas, that is how the EU works, unsuccessful people from national politics get promoted into Brussel. This is part of the dysfunctionality you can observe here.
The new puritanism is a gift to the far right. None of the Dutch far-right parties (JA21, PVV, FvD) or AfD is anti-AC; all are on record for wanting to reduce the cost of energy. I've always been mildly surprised that almost all of the coverage in mainstream media like the NRC Handelsblad about their policies is about their more extreme anti-immigrant ideas but almost their climate policies hardly feature at all.
I think we're about to turn a corner on this in the UK. In the past, hot weather maybe gave 10 days of discomfort over a year? It didn't seem worth installing expensive equipment over.
Now heatwaves are becoming more common, the calculation is starting to change. I've got a plumber friend who is moving into installing A/C, an indication that demand is starting to grow.
As you've pointed out in the past, peak A/C usages coincides with peak solar generation, so I think that will help with environmental concerns.
I could see European discourse adopting heat waves as American discourse adopts hurricanes and tornadoes in the sense that much more of the same is what Europe has to look forward to if they are not even more austere about climate change.
Ah, I love that Lee Kuan Yew quote about air conditioning! The man was a true visionary.
It’s honestly crazy to see how European elites are looking at this today. The world has so many weird things that make no sense. I vividly remember a few years back when Trump suggested people drink bleach to cure COVID—right around the time that Flat Earth documentary on Netflix became super popular. Back then, the whole world, including Europe, laughed at America for being so anti-science.
But look at them now. Those same European elites are unironically telling people to rub yogurt on their windows and die in heatwaves just to feel morally superior. I guess every country has its own special way of going crazy.
I have to admit I don’t like the air con to air con to air con chiller feel of Singapore (or Houston) but it sure beats the alternative! - unless I lived in a kampung in flip flops or was a fisherman off Ponggul or something.
I know people who grew up in Singapore without aircon back in the day and they said the mold situation was awful.
Deforestation and increasing urbanization in Asia/SEAsia is a big part of the problem.
I spent a hot season in Thailand in 1993 up in the be-jungled (actually, tropical hardwood forested) hills on the Burmese border, where it was so cold at night I rarely got more than 4-5 hours of sleep. I'd curl up in a ball and shiver.
But 90km away in Bangkok, daytime temps around 120' wouldn't cool until close to dawn.
Cut down the trees, and then watch how well concrete and asphalt work to store heat.
Honestly Noah while the anti-AC views you latch on exist, I think you're builidng something of a small mountain out of a mole-hill in real terms
Much more challenging is the slow / non-adaptation on the energy infrastructure front as well as certain transport infra - as like rail.
French reactors (but also broadly including wider euro generation) having to throttle back because cooling infra set-up is generally set-up on base assumption of "not this hot summers" (and e.g. using river water assumed to be both available - non-drought - and significantly cooler).
Grids that aren't ready for heat.
Evidently it's possible - Iberians are fine (but as is evident they didn't assume a cooler climate as Iberia of course).
The sluggish and more 'throttle usage' instinct versus OMG accelerate infra build now is a deeper and more concerning fundamental than some anti-AC postures (and where honestly I think you vastly over-estimate such views and underestimate degree to which just simply wasn't needed and now mentalities will take a bit to catch-up).
Would you similarly argue that gun deaths in Americas are also a minor problem? That we shouldn't focus on gun deaths cause it's not that big a deal? There are more European heat deaths than American gun deaths. Both are policy problems.
He's not saying the heat deaths arent a problem. He's saying the social opposition to air conditioning isn't as big of an issue as the actual infrastructure having difficulty providing energy.
Really more precisely I was taking aim at the sort of Socio-Political opposition that's posturedin public (as my closing remark "(and where honestly I think you vastly over-estimate such views and underestimate degree to which just simply wasn't needed and now mentalities will take a bit to catch-up)." there's a significant public lag on want/aware of aircon as this has emerged so quickly. T
the actual infrastructure constraints esp. in energy is the Policy angle that's really worrisome more than twits posturing against aircon.
But it WAS a problem, just not as large if one. France alone had 1600 heat deaths in 1990, well before climate change had a significant impact. The entire us has 158 that year.
Read again for understanding.
there is zero statement one way or another about heat-deaths not being a problem OR being a problem.
Yeah but, we had 37,000 gun deaths in 1990.
And the half of America that watches FOX News believes Global Warming is just a giant hoax, so Antifa commies can regulate our God-fearing Fossil Fuel corps. Or somesuch.
That's clearly false though. There is social opposition. Infrastructure concerns didn't cause the French don't make up non-existent medical conditions like "thermal shock". Infrastructure concerns didn't cause German broadcasters to lie about the effectiveness of air conditioning units. To the extent they would have a hard time with the energy requirements in the summer, the lack of social pressure to install air-conditioning means they don't solve the energy infrastructure issues. Furthermore, it doesn't follow that there is energy issues. If they have electricity to run a heat pump in the winter, then they should sill have electricity to run that same heat pump in the summer.
Your capacity to create straw men around statements not made nor implied nor even vaguely connected excepted in overheated excited imagination is quite impressive.
Do try to read again for comprehension instead of burning down a strawman.
The straw begged to be set aflame.
What???
I think this downplays an important factor, which is that temperatures have increased very fast. I'm from Paris, and until quite recently, AC was actually fairly unnecessary: temperatures were moderate the whole year. Now that has changed, the amount of adaptation needed is huge, and one way for our elites to mask their failure to anticipate it is to downplay the obvious technological solutions we failed to adopt.
My bet is that this is very transient. In fact, in France even the most pro-"degrowth" parties are starting to admit that AC is part of the solution.
Agree - the recency (and time limitedness) of the change - and the limited rhetorical façade it's more the rapidity of change that mass-market level people are just beginning to think they need something which wasn't really at all needed before*
AC will be bought, what's more broadly concerning is the lack of real genuine urgency for good infra investment (this is global) on either side of Atlantic for grid etc. (and of course infra-wise like the French nuclear plants - where clearly cooling systems revision is needed [hello too warm river water] as what was once rare clearly won't be]
* (now just hope you don't go for refrigerated offices like US, fuck me I hate that, visiting Euro side office I'm pleased to have office that's not a refigerator where the ladies bring sweaters)
104 Fahrenheit in Berlin yesterday.
Only a few years ago something like this simply could not have happened. We are talking about the same latitude as Edmonton, Alberta or the southern end of the Hudson Bay. Right now, it simply feels unreal. I very much doubt there's a lot of AC in Edmonton or on the shore of the Hudson Bay. People will react to it eventually, but it's quite human to simply be stunned for a while.
Most people in Edmonton have AC. It's a continental climate, albeit a dry one.
It's eastern North America that's much colder than Europe at same latitudes.
Yeah, I'm at a music festival 120 km north of Berlin and saturday was hot. Today is also pretty bad
Are energy prices a factor? I've read that it's more expensive in Europe than in the United States, which could also deter use.
This just isn't true. 2003, 2006, 2007, etc etc etc. 2003 was 23 years ago and killed 10s of thousands. That's a quarter century that they've had to figure this out and almost nothing has changed.
I pointed out elsewhere France alone had 1600 excess deaths from heat in 1990, WAY before climate change was significantly impacting things. The US had 158 that year. Warming may have made things worse recently but this has been a problem for a long time and the solution known.
The story of the 2003 heatwave is actually interesting.
It was a very traumatic event in France and led, among other things, to employees having to work one more day a year for free ("la journée de solidarité") to fund protection measures for the elderly and disabled. I can assure you that making French people work one more day for free without any protest is not "nothing."
But the event was framed as a "once in a century anomaly," and the catastrophe mainly as a societal failure to take care of isolated elderly people and unprepared hospitals (which it was).
My point is that because heatwaves have become more frequent and stronger in the last 5–10 years (they have), the framing will change and lead to the normalization of AC as a form of mitigation.
Forgot the link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heat_waves
A famous Canadian once accused Europe of being, "...old and cold and settled in its ways."
Culture conversatism is probably the biggest factor in the UK. I mean you have a prominent commentator like Peter Hitchens (brother of Christopher) bemoaning the introduction of central heating and claiming it has ruined society as people no longer sit around a fire as a group. Roger Scruton was another of this kind who thought technology was destroying society, their ideas have more purchase among the population than you think and is a bigger factor than the governments green leanings which are largely derided. The government's policy has more influence on say issues with transport or housing, but buying AC, at least small units is largely an individual decision.
British culture, especially elite British culture has been strongly informed since the late 19th century by a strong romanticist anti-industrial philosophy - although by the late 20th century old industries became part of the nostalgia. I think because Britain was the earliest to industrialise and because it did it in the most brutal and grimiest technological level of the industrial revolution, industry has always been suspect. Cities too - only on Britain compared to other developed countries is inner city a term of abuse, despite having one of the great world cities. People are supposed to aspire to a place in the country. This is a massive factor in the existence of the so called greenbelt, the resistance to new or expanded urban centres or new housing in general via a incredibly restrictive local planning regime that has sent housing to astronomical levels.
On top of that you have a working class culture that sees 'getting above yourself' as a great sin. Spending money above what you should in your class level is looked down on and buying ACs was seen as a luxury good like a flash car. The older generation in general were raised with pretty strict norms on what level of spending were appropriate, what is a waste if money or not and so on.
My bi-Atlantic back-and-forth sense is that habit and conservatism rather than actual policy inclination is much more important and Noah is far too weighting marginal here
Versus spending on infra on the system, that's much more real
Drop in on mayor Khan sometime
Well I will grant that in UK you have a uniquely bad combo of Lefty and Righty degrowthism.... Hobbitism.
Hobbits and Wood Elves all do their part to help keep Britain Romantic.
I live in Germany and will retrofit my apartment with AC. Having said that, the German ARD picture was framing this topic as a dilemma, not advocating people not to use AC. And the dilemma is real. We constantly have to make trade-off decisions. For instance, I believe that AI will solve really hard problems (like grid congestion), which requires building new data centers which require energy and water. You frequently talk about the folly of degrowth. There is an equal folly of continuing on the economic path we’ve been on without accounting for the damages of the commons. I would love to read your thoughts on what the right balance is here. 200,000 heat deaths were caused by lack of AC, and the heat was caused by our economic growth based (largely) on burning fossil fuels. If the cost was priced in, the markets would drive the needed efficiency and innovation. But the cost is ignored by our system, and is borne by families such as those of the 200000 dead. How do we fix this system? Degrowth is folly. Continuing as we have is also folly.
The 200k were killed by a lack of growth. As soon as you guys grow and add A/C you will stop having 200k deaths.
Believing we should control the temperature of the world, but shouldn’t control the temperature of our houses is an insane position.
And if/when Global Warming causes 40m of sea level rise, Europeans won't need to pay for air conditioning in places like Holland or much of the North German coastal plain...because they will be under water.
Not even legendary Dutch hydrological engineering will save them from them from 40m of sea-level rise.
Governments are bad at dealing with externalities, but Germany is particularly bad. Destroying fully functional zero-climate impact nuclear power stations because of irrational fear of radiation and returning to coal is bad, but for the public broadcaster to goad people into suffering (and possibly dying) during a heat wave by claiming air conditioning will cause a possible 0.05° temperature rise 70 years from now is ridiculous. If air conditioning is used only during heat waves it would have an unmeasurable impact on future temperatures. It would be better for all if ARD instead saved energy by shutting down its transmitters and shuttering its studios during the heat wave and stopped sending out bad propaganda.
American in Germany here. Thanks for continuing to highlight this issue. Having grown up with AC, I was shocked when I moved here to find that it’s almost universally absent from people’s homes. There’s certainly an element of cultural conservativism here, but also straight-up nonsense. Radio programs warn people about going into air conditioned stores, warning of temperature shock. By the way, the ARD campaign in Germany is funded by all of here, citizens and non-citizens alike. Imagine getting a bill in the mail from PBS once per quarter. I personally pay about $20 per month to fund these information campaigns, which are clearly political. An earlier comment disputes that, but I’m not convinced. One of the items on the laundry list of the AfD is the promotion of evidently political content via ARD, and I can’t help but sympathize to some extent.
A few years ago, there was a vote in my apartment block to permit someone to install an AC in their u it. It was voted down. One of the arguments was that they’re actually illegal because they’re so loud (which is nonsense, because they’re available for sale). So yes, elites block AC but also regular people vote to limit their own neighbors. And this was an elderly guy looking to install the AC.
Another point I rarely see addressed: many European countries produce an enormous amount of excess electricity in the summer. And that’s a good thing! But somehow this electricity isn’t supposed to be used for AC.
Europe has absorbed an insane amount of American culture over the past 50 years. It’s changed their language, transportation preferences/traffic, computer technology, privacy, work-life balance, diet, school systems, clothing preferences, on and on. I can appreciate some basic need to draw the line somewhere on transitioning completely to an American lifestyle. And that doesn’t take into account the adjustments they have made between European countries to make the EU work.
Leave the tater tots, take the air con
😆 The reverse would be for the US to take the universal healthcare and leave the Danish pastries, but I don’t see us doing that.
😂. Good one!
Of course, the 55pct tax bracket starts at around $90k for an individual in Denmark, so “universal” doesn’t mean “free”. Just means you pay in taxes as opposed to taxes,
Premiums and deductibles in the US.
Yes, I am very familiar with their definition of universal healthcare and tax policy. You basically pay based on your income and may be able to opt into some private features. The profits and administrative costs are greatly reduced when you don’t have to put up so many incentives plus guardrails to keep people out!
Air conditioning is American culture?
Willis Carrier invented the basis of air conditioning in the early 20th century. He was an American. Surely staying comfortable was a caveman instinct, but doing it with machines has American fingerprints all over it.
Ho about geothermal cooling? That makes more sense than anything involving an increase in the use of fossil fuel generated electricity. And fans! They will typically drop the effective temperature for the body by 5*F.
Preindustrial architecture, pretty much globally in hot climates, was/is amazingly effective at cooling interiors.
Yes, I grew up in an old house built into a hillside with no AC…but it was in the countryside surrounded by trees. Climate change has made that much more difficult, and most of modern life is not happening in pre-industrial architecture. The Middle East is becoming dangerously warm, for example.
Brit here. There’s a big gap between policy makers & activists and the population at large on this. Anecdote, but about 25% of people in a large group chat I’m in have bought portable aircon units in the last couple years. I know an increasing number of people who’ve retrofitted aircon into their homes. And a far far greater proportion who are or would consider doing one or other to cool their homes.
So it is changing, but it’s driven by need. Until the last 10 years it was unusual to have any days breaking 30 degrees Celsius (mid 80s) in a year. That’s massively escalated especially in the last 5 years with temperatures in the south hitting high 30s (high 90s/100) most years for at least a few days and having weeks in the high 20s (80s). Add to that our housing stock is way older than US / Canada - the average age of housing in the UK is over 75 years old. 20% of houses were built before the First World War… and because it’s unusual to have aircon, having it fitted and serviced is very expensive. So the northern European stance of avoiding AC until pretty recently made reasonable sense… its expensive to buy and to run, and tricky to fit and only really needed a few days a year why would individuals divert needed money to that over other things…
But the speed our climate changing and frequency of much hotter weather is changing the publics mind. And one way or other they are increasingly voting with their wallets to favour aircon. Even if regulations around new builds are lagging due to political/activist objections. You can’t find any model of portable aircon to buy in the UK this week, all sold out, and waiting times to fit window/central AC have rapidly increased…
Having just endured a second week this year where the inside temperatures in our house have hit 35 degrees (95F) every day, no part of our house has been below 25 (77F) day or night for several weeks, with several more to follow, and routinely sleeping in temperatures above 30 (86F) a portable aircon is on my shopping list as soon as any are in stock again. And when we move house next year I’m 100% getting AC installed…
Fully agree that a green movement focused on degrowth is part of the problem now. Also fully believe it’s self defeating in the end as the vast majority of people will not subscribe to it and will make different choices to protect their living standards and we’d do better to lean into that than trying to push the tide further out…
I lived in London mid 90’s into 2000s. Mid 90’s there were several years with hot summers with temps reaching the 30s.
https://www.markvoganweather.com/2026/06/05/fond-memories-of-the-last-usa-world-cup-british-summer-of-1994-by-richard-traut/
Finland, like other Nordics, have over 50% AC household penetration rate, and rapidly growing.
https://energy.ec.europa.eu/news/5-things-you-should-know-about-heat-pumps-2025-12-05_en
They don’t call them AC, though, but heat pumps, which may cause confusion and underestimation of AC prevalence. They are typically installed to heat homes more efficiently, saving money, but can be run in reverse to cool homes. They *decrease* CO2 emissions when used to warm homes. It is essentially renewable energy. And because it gets cold during winter even in souther Europe, you probably end up running heat pump for heating much more than for cooling, which is net positive for climate.
The key to bypass cultural obstructions is to avoid the evil American invention ’air conditioning’. It is not AC if it can warm the building. It’s an environmental-friendly heating device that accidentally can cool a home if you are not careful.
this is clearly a plot to enrich Big Yogurt
Minister 1: we need to do something about people dying of heat in their homes, and we can’t possibly recommend air con, what can we do?
Minister 2: tell them to cover their windows with aluminum foil?
M1: That will make them look crazy, just like the time we suggested tin foil hats for summer walks, not to mention aluminum is very energy intensive to manufacture.
M2: What about painting the windows? Nice whitewashing.
M1: But paints are oil based, and also emit noxious fumes which may also be greenhouse gases. This will also require stripping the paint in the autumn.
M2: Can they just splash on some tomato soup like the Just Stop Oil resisters do to paintings at the museum? That was highly effective!
M1: Hang on, I’m getting a call on line 1 from my contact at Chobani.
One thought reading both the essay and the comments:
I’m not convinced this is primarily a story about culture or ideology.
Most Europeans in the comments seem to be describing something closer to path dependence. A society that genuinely did not need widespread AC for decades built its housing, infrastructure, energy systems, and everyday habits around that reality. Now the environment is changing faster than those systems can adapt.
This makes me wonder whether the deeper issue is not air conditioning itself, but adaptation speed.
At the same time, I wonder whether “Europe” is too large a unit of analysis here. The AC debate itself illustrates the problem. Germans do not represent Spaniards. Parisians do not represent people in Marseille. Northern Europe does not face the same environmental pressures as Southern Europe.
If we look at adaptation through the lens of cities, regions, and globally connected industrial nodes rather than sovereign states, we may reach a different conclusion. What looks like “Europe resisting change” may actually be a highly uneven process in which some nodes adapt rapidly while others remain locked into older assumptions.
Europe and Japan may be confronting a broader challenge: highly successful, highly stable societies often become optimized for preserving existing arrangements. That works well in periods of gradual change, but may become a disadvantage during periods of technological and environmental acceleration.
From that perspective, AC is less a culture-war issue than a small example of a larger question: how quickly can a mature civilization update itself when the conditions that originally shaped its institutions no longer exist?
The future may belong less to countries as unified actors, and more to networks of cities, industries, and supply-chain nodes that can respond most effectively to changing conditions.
Exactly right. We live in Germany. It’s very hot and has been all week. Starting Monday it’s nothing but rain. We Just vacationed in Croatia in an eco resort: our bungalow had split AC. I could say more but Noah is really obtuse and honestly , somewhat ignorant about this.
This is also why I think the AC discussion may be relevant to the coming AI era.
Much of today’s AI debate is framed as competition between sovereign states: Europe versus America versus China. But large language models are only the most visible layer of a much larger industrial ecosystem.
In that sense, AI may not ultimately be about AI companies alone.
A good example is TOTO. Most people think of it as a Japanese toilet and bathroom brand. But through its ceramic expertise, TOTO also supplies electrostatic chucks, a critical precision component used to hold wafers during semiconductor manufacturing. These components matter for processes such as etching, deposition, ion implantation, metrology, and increasingly complex advanced chip production.
So one of the beneficiaries of the AI boom may be a company many people associate with toilets, not neural networks.
This is the point: the AI supply chain is full of hidden nodes. Some are model developers in the US and China. Some are memory-chip manufacturers in Korea. Some are fabs in Taiwan. Some are industrial automation firms in Europe. Some are precision-materials or component companies in Japan.
AC, toilets, and AI may seem unrelated, but they all point to the same issue: modern civilization is not organized neatly around sovereign states or headline technologies. It is organized through layered networks of infrastructure, materials, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and highly specialized industrial knowledge.
From that perspective, the question is not simply whether “Europe” wins or loses AI. The more interesting question is which cities, regions, industries, and supply-chain nodes can adapt, integrate, and create value within the emerging ecosystem.
Most (probably all) hotels I’ve been in in DE have air conditioning. And others have discussed here in the comments that many stores have AC. What’s meant, of course, is the near universal absence of AC in homes in many parts of Europe. That the hotel industry has adapted is beside the poibt.
This is a good post. Doing a repost of a "I remain right" piece like this is always fun.
That said, the exasperated tone of "these idiot Europeans defending a status quo that isn't good for them" is exactly how I felt when you wrote your post a few weeks ago defending for profit health insurance.
The defense wasn't that it saved money, or that it improved patient outcomes. Just that it wasn't the BIGGEST source of costs in the US system.
Not this old canard again!
We're not anti-AC - on the grounds of climate change or anything else. The lack of AC is due not to ideological or regulatory resistance but to far more fundamental factors like available space, housing stock and climate. Our housing stock is old and small compared to the US. Most office and retail outlet new builds and refurbs have AC built in or introduced temporarily for the few weeks of high temperatures we get a year. But in most homes there isn't room to install it permanently.
Not only does the size and age of our housing stock make it far harder to install AC but there is less incentive to install it because the UK and the rest of Europe is simply not as warm as the US is: the US national annual mean temperature is about 11.7°C to 12.7°C.; the UK annual average is 9°C to 10°C; the warmest US month (July) averages 31.2°C, whereas the warmest UK month (July) averages 19.1°C. More widely in Europe only a few southern island micro-climates like Cyprus reach the top US heat tier annually.
And then there's the social and aesthetic considerations. Heat removed from a house has to go somewhere and if you live in the high density housing that's common in Europe, that 'somewhere' will probably be the air that your neighbours breathe. And try fitting an AC unit to the outside of a C18th Georgian townhouse or a mid-Victorian terrace without making it look like a Steampunk art installation.
Well not a good excuse sir.
Every home built before say 1890 had to have:
Electric wires installed.
Lights installed.
Modern plumbing installed
Hot water baseboard or steam radiators installed
Telephones installed.
Central Air Conditioning is hard, not impossible or even difficult
Every home where?
I can estimate that 99% of homes in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Australia have electricity and running water. And they did not have when homes built still standing and lived in from the 14th century to today.
And it was all retrofit.
I've been to Europe more than 100 weeks of travel over 50 years.
I know, as you know, very very few buildings have original windows. most have been replaced with modern insulated easy opening windows.
Yes, but we need water and electricity. Besides, wires and pipes are fairly easy to add, especially to houses which don't already have wires and pipes in them. Central, permanent AC units aren't as easy to add - you need conduits or pipes much wider than you need for running water.
But the real point is that we don't need permanent AC in domestic dwellings because it's not hot enough here! It may become hot enough for it, but it isn't yet.
And adding modern insulated windows made sense because of the problem that we do have, which is that it's cold for much of the year. Cold and wet. And windows are generally a 'one in, one out' affair. They don't reduce valuable space in the house.
Newly built hospitals in Germany only have AC in the operating rooms, not in patient rooms or recovery areas. How can this be due to the fact that buildings in Europe are old?
If you’re worried about aesthetics and social factors, as you may recall from physics lessons heat rises and does not typically travel horizontally țo your neighbor’s houses. My house has two central air conditioning units and both are behind the house surrounded by walls and thus hidden from view and not very loud and the surrounding area isn’t noticeably warmer. They can also be installed on the rooftops, as is common in urban areas. Do you also worry when heating your house in the winter with a heat pump that you will make the outside air cooler and force that cold onto your neighbors, or maybe instead use an old fashioned fireplace and assault them with smoke and particulates to reduce electricity use?
There's no incentive to overcome whatever the barriers may be to getting permanent AC installed in small houses because we don't need it, because it rarely gets hot enough. Why contort and narrow already restricted spaces for something that you only need a couple of weeks a year, at most?
Every year, when the country finally warms up people think 'maybe I'll get temporary AC for this hot spell'. But by the time we've had a look at what's available online, the weather's back to it's 20 degree average and we don't think about it again for another 12 months.
You don't need physics to get the point. Just a little common sense. The hot air coming out of an AC unit can be a problem for near neighbours in summer because they are likely to open their windows to cool their homes down. The slight cooling effect on the air outside, of a heat pump in winter, doesn't affect neighbours because their windows are very likely closed (and probably double-glazed) to keep the heat in.
This is a non-issue in this country and in most of Europe. And the lack of AC has very little to do with climate change regulations.
The split units, wall mounted,
have made a difference in older homes.
I live in Europe, I love Europe, but I'm way too American to not have AC.
AC revolution is coming no matter what, people are too damn hot, every heat wave the little portable units sell out at the hardware stores.
/This is not cultural conservativism, Noah. Countries of the former Eastern Bloc are more culturally conservative than those in Western Europe, and politicians don't push this nonsense here.
This stems purely from the Green movement, whose motto is "reduce, reuse, recycle" on everything that eats some resources. You can't reuse or recycle air conditioning (meaning the power spent, not the device), so the only part left is "reduce".
German Greens are extra pronounced in this, a party of teachers (not irony: teachers are overrepresented in Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) whose life mission is to teach and preach aloud to a captive audience, even if the rest of the country is long fed up.
Merkel's CDU used to follow such trends blindly, and VdL is the last vestige of System Merkel still present in top politics, long after her political Mutti lost at the ballot box. Alas, that is how the EU works, unsuccessful people from national politics get promoted into Brussel. This is part of the dysfunctionality you can observe here.
Bulgarian here, correct. A/C are the standard here.
The new puritanism is a gift to the far right. None of the Dutch far-right parties (JA21, PVV, FvD) or AfD is anti-AC; all are on record for wanting to reduce the cost of energy. I've always been mildly surprised that almost all of the coverage in mainstream media like the NRC Handelsblad about their policies is about their more extreme anti-immigrant ideas but almost their climate policies hardly feature at all.
I think we're about to turn a corner on this in the UK. In the past, hot weather maybe gave 10 days of discomfort over a year? It didn't seem worth installing expensive equipment over.
Now heatwaves are becoming more common, the calculation is starting to change. I've got a plumber friend who is moving into installing A/C, an indication that demand is starting to grow.
As you've pointed out in the past, peak A/C usages coincides with peak solar generation, so I think that will help with environmental concerns.
I could see European discourse adopting heat waves as American discourse adopts hurricanes and tornadoes in the sense that much more of the same is what Europe has to look forward to if they are not even more austere about climate change.