Well, that was interesting.
Some quick thoughts below the cut.
So I’ve recently become much more aware of the Discourse about air conditioning that is common to much of northern Europe. There’s a lot of weirdness generally, but there are certain strains that pop up regularly.
One is Left / green concern about emissions. Unlike a lot of Left / green concerns, this one doesn’t stop at hand-wringing. It tends to go straight to moral condemnation and direct action. A surprising lot of northern European greens view aircon as somewhere between “acceptable only in the direst of needs” and “just inherently very wicked”.
Another is a strain of what I can only call machismo. Find an online discussion about aircon, and within a few comments you’ll find the guy — it’s always a guy — who wants you to know that he was with British Forces Arabian Penninsula at Aden back in the day, and nobody had ever heard of this aircon nonsense, and they were just fine, damn your eyes. Or the guy — it’s always a guy — who is living in a house his great-grandfather built with his own two hands, insulated proper-like and with real brass fittings, warm in winter and cool in summer, add a ceiling fan and that’s all a man should ever need.
Related to that last one is Anything But Aircon. You see, if you just install a geothermal heat pump, and get better insulation, and plant trees around the house and ivy on outer walls, and add awnings and external shading, and paint your roof white, and get double- glazed windows with louvers, and a ceiling fan in every room, and fill your living spaces with large house plants, and also sleep with a mattress topper and 100% breathable linen or high-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, then you should be completely fine.
Yet another is, not exactly anti-Americanism, but defining-us-against-Americanism. Those huge malls — icy cold, I needed a sweater! Have you heard they have stadiums that are air-conditioned? And ice in their beer!
Apropos of that last point. Here’s a temporal heat map of London:
and one for New York City:
— But NYC has a relatively mild climate by North American standards. Here’s Kansas City:
In Kansas City, nature is actively trying to kill you quite a lot of the time. There’s literally no place in Europe, from Cornwall to the Urals, that has a climate as extreme as Kansas City.
And these are the temperate parts of the USA — the bits where average temperatures are comparable to much of Europe. I’m not even going to bother with maps from Houston or New Orleans or Los Angeles.
Do Americans overuse aircon? Oh yes, we absolutely do. But do we need aircon? Also yes. Most of us do, at least some of the time. There are a couple of corners of the country where it rarely gets that warm — upper New England, a strip along the Pacific coast, the airier bits of the mountain West. But around 80 percent of the US population lives in places where summers without aircon are not just unpleasant, but actively bad for mental and physical health. 99% of homes in Houston have aircon. And if you’ve ever spent a summer in Houston, that statistic will leave you wondering how there can possibly be 1% that don’t.
On the positive side, the US has built about all the aircon it’s going to.
This is very much not the case around the world! Here’s a projection of the growth of aircon worldwide.
And, you know, aircon saves hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide every year. Heat stress and dehydration are killers, especially for small children and the elderly. Workers are more efficient with aircon, and children learn better, and hospitals with aircon have better outcomes for the sick and injured. And do you really want to tell the gasping family in Uttar Pradesh, hey, sorry folks but no aircon for you — we have to pull that ladder up behind us, for the good of the planet?
Air conditioning currently causes around 3.6% of greenhouse gas warming. In terms of CO2, it’s a bit less — around 2.7%. But a lot of aircons use refrigerants that are greenhouse gases in their own right, so that bumps the total up.
Looked at one way, aircon produces more emissions than the entire aviation industry. That’s a lot! Looked at another way, we could turn off every air conditioner on the planet tomorrow, and a couple of billion people would be miserable, and hundreds of thousands would die, and there’d be massive economic and social disruption and… we’d reduce emissions by a barely noticeable 3.6%.
That said, more aircon is going to mean more emissions and more warming. So, by selfishly trying to cool ourselves, are we going to cook the planet?
Well… like everything related to climate change, it’s a bit more complicated. For one thing, aircon designs have become dramatically more efficient in recent years. And we’re not even close to the thermodynamic limits, so there’s every reason to think further advances are coming. Current thinking is that increases in efficiency will claw back between a third and half of the increase in electricity demand. So, still not great, but less bad.
Also, electricity in 2050 is going to be, worldwide, a lot less carbonized than it is right now. If you’re running your aircon off solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear, you’re not generating any emissions. And by 2050, hundreds of millions of people will be powering their aircons with low- or no-carbon electricity. Again, still not great, but much less bad than if we added all those aircons today.
And, you know, the folks in Uttar Pradesh and Nanjing and Kinshasa are going to get their aircon. That is, as it were, baked in.
I’ll end with one other fact. I mentioned that aircon produces more emissions than the entire aviation industry. But aircon produces only about a quarter as much emissions as heating. For some reason a lot of people code heating as a necessity of life and aircon as a luxury. Is that objectively correct? I’m not sure.
Anyway. Aircon: it’s complicated.
{ 51 comments… read them below or add one }
Matt 07.10.26 at 9:59 am
If you’re running your aircon off solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear, you’re not generating any emissions.
In a number of places in Australia (maybe all now? I’m not sure) people can get free electricity in the middle of the day – several hours in the middle of the day – mostly because there is so much solar in the middle of the day that we might as well use it. That said, when I looked in to it, it didn’t seem like it would actually save me that much money, if any, because the system was set up in a such a way that the companies can charger you more the rest of the day, so they don’t lose any money. At least that’s how it looked to me. At least, it’s not very clear or transparent. That seems to somewhat defeat the purpose. But, it was recommended that people heat or cool their houses a lot during that middle of the day period, so that they could do less of that later. That seems like a great idea! Except that most Australian houses have worse insulation than your typical metal garden tool shed, so even if you do that it won’t last for long. But maybe we can get some actual insulation at some point, and then take advantage of all the cheap solar in the middle of the day to heat or cool, and the situation will be better.
engels 07.10.26 at 11:27 am
Averages are important but it’s above 30C (86F) for about 5 or the next 7 days in London this week, which is literally “off the chart” afaics. Many Londoners don’t have aircon and many live in ancient houses with big windows designed around stairwells that are effectively giant chimneys that trap the heat on the top floor. Keep calm and carry on sweating…
I do sort of buy the Green argument that absent climate action aircon is basically paying to inflict the heat on someone else.
afeman 07.10.26 at 11:57 am
AI-sounding text descriptions of graphics are getting through, but not the graphics themselves (except for the first two)
Doug Muir 07.10.26 at 12:42 pm
WRT both 1 and 2, the issue of existing housing stock is huge. Part of what triggered this post is that I live in a 60 year old German house. It’s snug and cosy in winter — but was almost uninhabitable last month, because it was built to trap heat, not exclude it.
The US has something of an advantage here, since much of the housing stock was designed for both heat and cold. On the other hand, a lot of US housing (and commercial space) was built on the assumption that cheap energy was an eternal certainty.
Countries that are building a lot of new homes, apartments and office spaces have the chance to get it right. Whether that will happen is something else entirely.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 07.10.26 at 12:43 pm
afeman @3, this seems to be an intermittent problem. I see it just fine on my machine, but that’s me.
Are others seeing this? (Or, is there anyone who can see all the graphics normally?)
Doug M.
oldster 07.10.26 at 1:48 pm
Graphics appear just fine on this MacBook running Safari.
JimV 07.10.26 at 2:10 pm
“Is there anyone who can see all the graphics normally?”
Yes, I’ve had no problems seeing the graphs. On an ACER Windows 7 laptop which I hope will last me until I die.
Thanks for another interesting post.
afeman 07.10.26 at 2:22 pm
Sorry, it appears to be another of an increasing set of problems with Firefox. Looks fine with Safari and Chrome.
Alex SL 07.10.26 at 3:14 pm
Very good piece, thanks.
Having grown up in Germany, I was originally kind of opposed to aircon, falling perhaps a bit into the machismo bucket you describe. To be precise, I never denied its utility as such especially in hot climates, but in Germany of the 1990s-2000s I felt that where people used aircon in trains, buses, or shopping centers, they tended to crank it up (or down, in terms of temperature) to a ridiculous degree. You would walk around in a t-shirt in summer feeling a bit hot but tolerable, then shiver for two hours because you had to sit still at what felt like at most 16C in the inter-regional train, and when you left the train, the heat that was previously tolerable suddenly hit you like a hammer because now your body had acclimatised to those 16C. We lived in Australia for over a decade before we got aircon, because until the black summer of 2019-2020, it felt like an unnecessary luxury, and even now we predominantly use it as heating in winter. Also, even now it truly is unpleasant how aircon air dries out my nose over time.
That being said, the left-moralist and anything but aircon buckets are ridiculous, and even as a teenager I would have recognised them as such. I am utterly mystified how certain French politicians can say aicron is bad while hundreds if not thousands of Europeans are dying of heat. The logic appears to be that if we protect people, we won’t have an incentive to decarbonise, similar to the constant playing off of personal choices against systemic problems (stop recycling and riding a bicycle, you fool, don’t you know that all of climate change is caused by twenty large corporations?).
Now, I don’t believe for a moment that we will have decarbonised by 2050, just look at Trumpism and those data centres being planned all over the place. But in terms of what we SHOULD do, it seems obvious to me that it is install more aircon in areas that need it while running that aircon with renewable energy. It will save people’s lives and make other’s lives more bearable. We can chew the gum of personal responsibility and walk the systemic solution at the same time.
And, of course, be it your house or the bus you are driving, don’t crank it up to 16C. 23C is totally fine and saves energy.
Michael Cain 07.10.26 at 3:25 pm
For some reason a lot of people code heating as a necessity of life and aircon as a luxury. Is that objectively correct?
Yes. The structure of the temperature graph masks it somewhat, but there’s a big chunk of the Kansas City map that falls in “frigid”. (The London map gets down to very cold, but doesn’t reach freezing let alone frigid.) Kansas City will, from time to time, experience -25C temperatures. Exposure to those temperatures is lethal in a short period of time. But perhaps more important in the contemporary world, indoor plumbing requires that the temperature in the building stay above freezing.
Holland’s canals used to famously freeze. That day may come again when the AMOC collapses.
engels 07.10.26 at 4:36 pm
The logic appears to be that if we protect people, we won’t have an incentive to decarbonise
I think it’s that your personal solution is actually contributing to the catastrophe it’s “protecting” you from individually (heating isn’t like that).
hix 07.10.26 at 4:51 pm
First of all, the ideological opposition to air conditioning in Germany drives me crazy, too. AC has become much cheaper, while the summer heat has gotten significantly worse. It’s completely insane that we are still building new care homes without any air conditioning.
Second, regarding the Green Party’s actual platform, they seem quite rational about it. They basically support AC by emphasizing that modern heat pumps provide a cooling function essentially for free.
Third, since we should be using heat pumps anyway—and solar power pushes electricity prices down to near-zero or even into negative territory during the hottest parts of the day (yes, even in Germany)—it is utterly absurd not to utilize AC. Of course, there’s a difference between sensible cooling and demanding a constant 22°C everywhere, 24/7. The latter isn’t free, though I’d argue that for vulnerable groups, it is absolutely the right policy.
My father’s nursing home is only 12 years old. It still relies entirely on conventional heating with no AC, and they have even banned residents from putting portable units in their rooms.
In contrast to the Green Party, you still get accusatory stares from certain people when you demand air conditioning at a support center for people with mental illnesses—even though both psychiatric medications and the conditions themselves make the heat far more unbearable for this group. But then again, these individuals live up to every negative stereotype: they take intercontinental flights every year, work on 12-year-old servers, run a building heating system that hasn’t been completely turned off in over a decade, wash dishes by hand to “save water,” and view doing too much origami as an environmental hazard.
Alex SL 07.10.26 at 5:11 pm
On the matter of treating heating different than cooling, I have read the argument that that is colonialism/racism and find that rather convincing:
I as a European am used to needing heating, so that is normal and what normal people do. Those dark-skinned people in the tropics, however, are just weak and lazy, because living in Europe, I don’t know what the fuzz is about, hot days are nice!, and cooling is weird and not normal to me.
That is perhaps an argument that could be made to fellow lefties who instinctively feel that aircon is bad because it detracts from solving climate change: would you also tell your fellow citizens to freeze to death in winter to reduce our ecological footprint? Is this your cultural bias at work? You don’t want to be biased against the poor in warmer countries, do you?
hix 07.10.26 at 5:37 pm
“WRT both 1 and 2, the issue of existing housing stock is huge. Part of what triggered this post is that I live in a 60 year old German house. It’s snug and cosy in winter — but was almost uninhabitable last month, because it was built to trap heat, not exclude it.”
Ironically, my parents 50 year old house did a lot better than the 12 year old elderly home he moved into just at the start of the heat wave, at least in a basement vs basement comparison, not to mention the basement as an emergency spot to sleep.
Reasons i think: (1) No discpline whatsoever at the elderly home by staff regarding closing the entrances to the inside garden during the day after someone went in or out.
(2) father turned large parts of the garden almost into a forrest so no one can see him —> under normal circumstances rather too much shadow, under those perfect.
(3) Hot part of town vs suburb regarding base temperature.
Thomas Gordon Hewitt 07.10.26 at 9:35 pm
My issue with American aircon usage, is not that we mostly have it, but that we tend to use it thoughtlessly. I live inland in California. I’ve had periods of a week plus with highs above 40C, the average high this time of year is 35plus. Now it is almost always dry, which is usually a big help. But sunny all the daylight hours, means any surface in the sunlight, including those using commercial grade white are very hot. But the dryness buys one big possibility to mitigate the energy cost of cooling. At night, most nights you can use air circulation via good old fashioned fans to precool the house mu morning. I can thus get by with zero use on AC on most days with the high below 32 or 33, and cut total usage considerably on all but the hottest days. Yet I bet less than 1% of people do this -including those whose electric bills are creating financial distress.
Aardvark Cheeselog 07.10.26 at 10:29 pm
With respect to existing housing stock in the “temperate” US, what fraction has ac? What fraction of Missouri outside of KC? I grew up mostly in the Midwest: houses and apartment buildings were not designed for central air: retrofits were pretty much limited to window mount units.
I know a lot of housing has been built around where I last lived around Chicago, and plausibly most of that was designed around central air. But there’s a lot of old housing in a lot of places that’s getting less inhabitable.
Thomas Gordon Hewitt 07.10.26 at 11:24 pm
Federal Government wise it’s crazy in the USA. Last week they deleted hundreds of government web sites related to energy efficiency. Note that the number one political issue here is “affordability”, and increasing energy prices are a substantial part of that concern. Of course the war has increased them, although that mostly shows up in transportation costs. Also Trump has forced utilities to keep open or even re-open non-economic coal plants that were slated for shutdown. This directly increases utility bills. Clearly showing solidarity with fossil fuel owning billionaires is more important than costs that accrue to the working class.
Garrett Wollman 07.11.26 at 2:10 am
One thing I bring up whenever this issue is raised is that networked community ground-source heat pumps are absolutely a thing and significantly more energy efficient than air-to-air heat pumps or stand-alone air conditioners. The same thermal transfer medium (water with some additives) can serve commercial refrigeration, domestic heating and cooling, and domestic water heating at the same time, in the same cycle of the loop: the waste heat of cooling can be recycled for heating, regardless of the time of year. Many cities have district heating, but this is unfortunately all steam, rarely made available in residential districts, and almost always the waste product of fossil power stations. Networked GSHPs provide many of the same economic benefits while also being useful for both heating and cooling cycles.
D. S. Battistoli 07.11.26 at 4:57 am
I realize that this strays dangerously close to your ad-hominem’d straw-man “guy—it’s always a guy—who is living in a house his great-grandfather built with his own two hands, insulated proper-like” but a lot of the most innovative architecture and urban design here in northwest Africa is conceptualized around limiting use of the European high-modernism materials (concrete, glass walls) in the twentieth century, and instead revising building design and material use to limit the energy claims made by a building’s occupants once construction is complete.
And while among such architects, Francis Kere (who I think lives in Berlin) is a man, Aziza Chaouni, Salima Naji, Akosua Obeng Mensah, Alia Bengali, Nzinga Mboup, Chinwe Ohajuruka, Akuto Konou, and Mariam Issoufou Kamara are all women.
Doug Muir 07.11.26 at 9:32 am
Alex @9, “We can chew the gum of personal responsibility and walk the systemic solution at the same time.” is good.
Michael @10, “indoor plumbing requires that the temperature in the building stay above freezing.” — sure sure. But if we’re discussing temperatures above freezing, then most heating is about comfort, not necessity.
Put another way: say you have a choice between (A) all indoor temperatures — home, school, work — are locked at 5 C / 40 F; or, (B) same, but locked at 35 C / 95 F. Which would you choose?
Doug M.
Matt 07.11.26 at 9:41 am
Put another way: say you have a choice between (A) all indoor temperatures — home, school, work — are locked at 5 C / 40 F; or, (B) same, but locked at 35 C / 95 F. Which would you choose?
Is it night or day? Actually, I might like 5C more at any time, depending on the humidity, but it isn’t very nice for typing, or reading books, I’ll admit.
The first winter I lived in Russia (1999/2000) there was a huge cold spell in Siberia that was super cold even for Siberia. Russian heaing is almost all supplied by central steam heat. In many towns it got so cold that the steam heat system broke own, shooting water vaper (that then froze) all over, and then died. People tried to use electric space heaters, which then killed the electric systems in the towns. So, it was something like -30/-40 for several days. I was told that what you do then is mostly stay in bed, but I’m not sure. Even Siberians found it unbearable. One of Putin’s early doings that winter (I can’t remember if he was still just prime minister or if he’d already become president yet) was to send an “army of plumbers and electricians” to Siberia to get the heat and electricity working. It mostly worked, and bought him a huge amount of credit for being effective that he was able to coast on for quite a while. Moral of the story: people don’t like extreme weather that causes them trouble, and will give a lot of credit to people who seem to help with it, even if they are otherwise pretty bad and don’t really have any good ideals. I fear this might not be a good thing for us.
notGoodenough 07.11.26 at 9:54 am
Adaptation and mitigation aren’t really in conflict: climate change requires both; things like air conditioning can save lives particularly with rising temperatures.
However, this is not merely a technological question, but also a social, political, and economic one. Firstly, we should consider distribution: many forms of adaptation (e.g. air conditioning, better insulation, heat pumps, flood resilience, etc.) are often implemented at the level of the individual household. This means the costs are also borne by individuals, with access increasingly determined by wealth. If adaptation is primarily something people have to buy for themselves, then it risks becoming another area where those with resources are protected while those without them bear the brunt of climate change.
Secondly, as previously implied, adaptation and mitigation are both necessary – but they are not equally politically thorny (adaptation often produces immediate, visible benefits, while mitigation frequently requires confronting powerful economic interests and accepting disruptive changes in how we produce and consume energy). Looking at the history of climate policy over the last several decades, I don’t think we’ve earned much confidence that governments are especially willing to pursue the harder option. After all, we have known about anthropogenic climate change for a very long time, yet substantial mitigation has been repeatedly deferred until the problem has become much larger. I don’t believe it unreasonable to be concerned that adaptation may become an excuse for continuing to postpone emissions reductions.
So, I’m generally in favour of adaptation, but only if it may be delivered equitably while still maintaining the political will to pursue mitigation with the seriousness it requires.
The likelihood of this I shall, as it were, left as an exercise for the reader.
D. S. Battistoli 07.11.26 at 11:25 am
@Doug, I actually had to go back and check one of your assertions—it seemed a little counterintuitive at first:
<
blockquote>Another is a strain of what I can only call machismo. Find an online discussion about aircon, and within a few comments you’ll find the guy—it’s always a guy—who wants you to know that he was with British Forces Arabian Penninsula at Aden back in the day, and nobody had ever heard of this aircon nonsense, and they were just fine, damn your eyes. Or the guy—it’s always a guy—who is living in a house his great-grandfather built with his own two hands, insulated proper-like and with real brass fittings, warm in winter and cool in summer, add a ceiling fan and that’s all a man should ever need.
<
blockquote>
The thing is, being male and having particularly strong pride in either one’s status as a veteran of foreign wars outside of Europe, or the achievements of great-grandparents born in the same municipality as one now lives are actually really solid political indicators.
And so I wondered: is a supporter of the far-right the axiomatic European opponent of personalized airconditioning use? (you’ve already addressed left-wing attitudes, so we can set as a null hypothesis a bimodal distribution, with the center-right most air-conditioning-supportive, and the left and far right most opposed). Heck, do men support its use more than women?
So, you’ll never guess what I found.
That whole machismo-fueled (and far-right-correlating) opposition to airco usage has almost no basis in the ample scientific surveys that have studied the question.
In Europe, far more than in the United States, support for personalized action to combat climate change (under which household-level airconditioning use would fall) is closely correlated with, more than anything else, female gender (source. (Now, your initial sample is online comment sections, which themselves may skew male, depending on what sites you’re frequenting).
In France, Marine Le Pen (whose supporter base does not lean female, but does contain a lot of people who live in the same town as their great-grandparents, or who think that things like the French side of the Algerian Revolution were demonstrations of manly virtues) famously made just last month the
same argument that the alternative to air-conditioning is death-by-nature.
Now, Doug, you’re free to make a pro-air-conditioning argument, obviously, but it feels a little strange that you’re associating the other side of the argument with self-conscious men living in their great-grandparents houses or proud of their military service (I know from your other blog posts you read scientific literature often and with gusto, so it’s not like you have an earnest belief that online comment sections are representative of anything at all). It seems like you’re trying to gin up here an exclusively centrist credibility, when you are actually making an argument that is most acceptable in Europe to the far-right and partially acceptable to a very small coterie of centrists—and most acceptable to men.
D. S. Battistoli 07.11.26 at 11:36 am
Oof, for want of a forward slash. . . .
I would really love a “preview” option for comments, given the lack of a WYSWYG interface.
engels 07.11.26 at 1:58 pm
Can you get into a situation where two neighbours have AC and the exhaust blows into the other’s home and they’re both cranking it up in response, like some neighbours do with loud music?
I read that widespread AC can cause a 1.3C increase in LA’s outdoor night time temperature and some quick and dirty calcs suggest that counteracting that increase could represent 10-25% of a household’s AC use at the time. Quite the collection action paradox!
I do use the TGH fan first approach in my car (not expecting a medal from Greta Thunberg or anything…)
novakant 07.11.26 at 3:49 pm
I sit in Starbucks to get work done – that’s two red flags right there, but I’m a pragmatist. Our child, however, is not so lucky and neither are millions of school children and teachers. Neither is our cat, who spends his days mostly in the washbasin.
But all of this is still relatively bearable while in parts of Africa and Asia it is lethal. I don’t see how everybody there is going to get aircon in the forseeable future when government advisers project it will take 25 years to fit every school in the UK with aircon.
So while I’m trying to navigate personal responsibilty and day to day life, maybe it is time to collectively take all this global warming stuff seriously, as in change our lifestyle fundamentally.
novakant 07.11.26 at 3:55 pm
Full disclosure: I use the aircon in our fossil fuel powered car quite a bit these days. But my wife has range anxiety and a tank lasts about 2 months as I only ever drive our kid around London to various activities. Change is going to be hard, though.
Thomas Gordon Hewitt 07.11.26 at 5:34 pm
Car AC use is even more wasteful than home. The standard practice leave the car out in the sun with windows closed. Your rolling greenhouse is going to be 20-30 C hotter than the air. So even if its 20C or less outside, the first thing 99% of people do is crank the AC up to the max. I open the windows for the first mile or so, until the big heat buildup is gone. After that it’s up to taste. The other thing that I think makes me a unique is that I consider that running the AC is an investment in future cools air -for at leastthe next hour. Turn it off for the last few minutes -recover some benefit from the “investment” you already made, rather than waste even more.
Kenny Easwaran 07.11.26 at 7:14 pm
re: engels at 25
It’s very rare for AC heat exhaust to blow into another person’s home – that would likely only ever happen with poorly-placed window units in two apartments around a narrow shared alley or U in a building.
And regarding a 10% increase in AC use caused by outdoor heating from widespread air conditioning – this really doesn’t sound like a collective action problem at all. Asking people to pay a 10% tax so that others can benefit is usually the solution to a collective action problem, not the problem itself. There would be a collective action problem if eliminating everyone’s 1 degree of discomfort made everyone else 9 degrees worse off (because then it would be easily bearable if no one did the AC) but if you’re eliminating everyone’s 9 degrees of discomfort while making everyone else 1 degree worse off, then it just sounds like you’re solving a problem.
(Also, Los Angeles is an unusual case – although Doug suggested that Los Angeles is warm, there was actually not one night last year when the overnight low was above 20 degrees C, and in the previous years it was only about 5-10 nights that were that warm: https://www.climatestations.com/los-angeles-ca/ In Los Angeles, air conditioning is usually just about keeping things cool in the late afternoon, or for people who forgot to open their windows to cool things off at ight.)
hix 07.12.26 at 12:35 am
Distric cooling systems can largely solve the externality issue in dense populated areas.
Paris already has a pretty big net if i´m not mistaken for example.
But then, in Germany we are at a point where even the places with the most vulnurable groups have no AC whatsover, at least adding AC to hospitals, elderly homes and the like will not start some externality cascade.
engels 07.12.26 at 11:50 am
Thanks Kenny. It seems similar to vehicle congestion to me, which I think of as a classic collective action problem, but perhaps I should have said chocolate laxative.
https://marxistsinspace-blog.tumblr.com/post/94521988/%C5%BEi%C5%BEek-and-the-chocolate-laxative
I agree public heating/cooling systems are the solution to this problem, just a pity in Britain this will almost inevitably be organised via the legalised granny mugging of the private equity and consulting industries.
TF79 07.12.26 at 3:03 pm
It looks like the entire state of North Dakota will be above 100 degrees today (and upwards of 112 degrees in eastern MT near Billings). I was curious how high a/c ownership rates are in ND, and they’re at 98%, so it seems they’re prepared for it (not their first rodeo, I suppose).
Thomas P 07.13.26 at 8:01 am
“Those huge malls — icy cold, I needed a sweater! ”
That is definitely a thing. I spent a summer in Florida and those malls were horrible. You dressed for and got used to the heat, and then you went into a mall that seemed like it was designed for winter clothing. Some AC is nice, but if you don’t overuse it there is less of a chock to go outside.
marcel proust 07.13.26 at 12:32 pm
D. S. Battistoli: I would really love a “preview” option for comments, given the lack of a WYSWYG interface.
You seem to be unaware of all the internet traditions, the most pertinent one here being that CT is and proudly, defiantly remains part of the blogosphere 1.0. No wysiwyg for you!
I’m a guy who was reading and commenting on CT back in the day — lemme tell you about Michael Bérubé or John & Belle — and nobody had ever heard of this wysiwyg nonsense and everyone was just fine. And I’m still reading and commenting on this blog that these old timers built with their own two hands, constructed proper like without decent support for graphics (@afeman speaks for me & Chrome on Windows 11): that’s all a man should ever need.
Laban 07.13.26 at 12:46 pm
I follow Thomas Gordon Hewitt re car aircon, but I also cover the car windscreens with insulating foil to reduce the oven effect.
We have an old (1830s?) house with a modern extension in traditional style – the old house is whitewashed, and it makes a huge difference to how hot the brickwork gets. The new bit is plain brick, and when you walk past it in the evening you can feel the heat coming off it. Before I even think about aircon I’m going to paint the new bit white.
Trader Joe 07.13.26 at 3:55 pm
” If you’re running your aircon off solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear, you’re not generating any emissions. ”
I have solar on my home in the US South east and during the summer months I still routinely generate a bill credit, which is to say that I produce more solar from the system than I’m consuming from my own home. Its the winter months (Dec-Feb) where I routinely have an actual charge since I don’t produce as much solar and actually consume more kilowatts heating.
We have 4 geothermal heatpumps. The newest one (2 yrs old) is fantastically more efficient than any of the others – runs half as much and produces much better cooling (and especially heat).
I’d also note with respect to heat pumps that to a certain degree there is a maximum level of usage – which is to say when the outside temperature relative to the inside temperature your aiming for is wide enough that its basically running 24/7 it doesn’t matter how low you set the thermostat or how hot it gets outside – there is a limit to the amount of cooling power a given system can produce. Most units never reach these thresholds, but it ultimately makes power consumption logrithmic rather than linear.
engels 07.13.26 at 7:33 pm
Have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/climate/extreme-heat-emissions-energy-trends.html
D. S. Battistoli 07.14.26 at 6:52 am
marcel proust @34
Ah, good times! I was a lurker back then. I don’t think I ever commented, or if I did, only rarely, and certainly with whatever email address and blog address I had at the time. I stopped reading before Bérubé joined, not out of displeasure; I came to the end of my university career. John H, Belle, John Q, Kieran, Henry, Harry, and the whole gang felt like the sort of folk I aspired to resemble when I would be somewhat older. I also followed the Valve, the spinoff blog, which apparently no longer exists.
I imagined I would have loved to read the David Graeber seminar that later ran had I not been in the middle of the rainforest when it happened (reading Debt and having occasional engaging in-person conversations with an anarchist anthropologist, as it so happens).
Ah, old times.
Tm 07.14.26 at 7:33 am
I cannot quite follow the premises of this debate. What I’ve seen in online discussions is Americans telling Europeans why don’t they just install AC and get it over with, AC solves the heat problem, and I’m like sure, we’ll install a few hundred million AC units by next week, easy to do…
Four points.
First, places like hospitals, nursing homes, schools need to have adequate cooling and making this happen is clearly government responsibility (by passing regulation and providing money). I don’t think any left/green European opposes that (correct me if I’m wrong).
The problem is that our shitty corrupt governments actually don’t want to spend the money on saving the lives of vulnerable people and one even gets the impression that they may see the increased mortality among the elderly (https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps) as a success, not a failure. The whole political and media discourse has been suspiciously silent about the thousands of deaths during these heat waves (we’re on the third record-breaking heat wave this year and it’s only July). Our politics has moved so insanely to the right, egged on by the hyper-rich whose world view is pure social darwinism, that spending money on anything other than armament is now seen as impermissibly woke.
Secondly, equipping every private home with AC won’t happen any time soon. It’s not feasible in the short or even medium term even if it were desirable, which I’m not convinced of (see below). So touting AC as a “solution” to the problem of heat waves is just delusional. Of course individual home owners who can afford it will install cooling, but those most vulnerable – low income elderly people in rental apartments – won’t get AC any time soon. To help them, we need other strategies. For example there need to be cool places where people can go during heat waves, and there need to be care workers looking especially after alone living vulnerable people. Also, cities must continue to invest in green space, trees, water features, and unsealing. This too is not a short term strategy. Trees take a long time to grow. But it’s a strategy that city governments can implement, whereas AC is an individual “solution”.
Third, contrary to some claims I have seen, AC does have constraints. Texas regularly suffers power outages during heat waves because the electrical grid can’t handle the strain of so many millions of AC units running full power. The grid can be upgraded, but it needs to be done and costs money. Then there is the issue of the exhaust heat. There is after all a physical difference between heating and cooling: you cannot cool a space without creating excess heat (2nd law of thermodynamics), thus contributing to the heat problem you want to solve. There are no really dense cities in the Southern US but in a city like London or Paris, imagining millions of AC units blowing heat, this will have a measurable effect on the temperature. The excess heat will be absorbed by the buildings and streets, contribute to the heat island effect, AC will have to work even harder, create more excess heat… Not everybody can stay inside, those outside will suffer extra. It really isn’t that simple.
And fourth, of course, we need to double down on decarbonizing so things will at least not getting much worse to the point that Southern Europe becomes uninhabitable. I’m sure everybdy here understands that but our governments and media don’t act as if they do, and that’s the real shocker. We are on the third record-breaking heat wave in a single year and nobody in power – absolutely nobody in government but also nobody in the mainstream media – treats it as the emergency it is. And surely part of this is that the elites already have AC.
Tm 07.14.26 at 7:34 am
We are on the third record-breaking heat wave in a single year and nobody in power – absolutely nobody in government but also nobody in the mainstream media – treats it as the emergency it is. And surely part of this is that the elites already have AC.
Andrew Hamilton 07.14.26 at 12:26 pm
As an old man who has lived off and on in hot places, I feel compelled to stand up for the old soldier slurred in this post , even though I didn’t off-hand remember where Aden was and never had ice in my beer.
At almost eighty years old, I have the advantage of having noticed from the get-go that it sometimes gets hot, and that people over about ten years old are going to complain when it happens. I suspect that this is playing a role in the discussion here. It seems universal: even in hot places, when the temperature gets a few degrees above normal the punters are going to moan and try to fan themselves with their bottoms of their T-shirts, which seems only to make them more uncomfortable.
I think acclimation plays a role that is not getting enough play in this discussion. You’ve probably all heard some old guy –it’s always a guy– talking about being called to the capital city where they had air-conditioning, and freezing in the conference rooms and house parties down there.
I think I can offer a work-around for the perceived problem. Back in the day in west Africa, if you lived in a place with electricity your house had two meters, one for the lights and ceiling fan and short-wave radio and hair-curlers, and one for air-conditioning. The second cost a lot more per kilowatt-hour than the first. This separated the sheep from the goats, or the whiners from the self-flagellators, pretty quickly. It might work in a place like, say, France, where you can take a sweltering mid-day nap but at least you’re unconscious and unable to appreciate your discomfort, or cover your outside walls with ivy and paint your roof white, or get to a shaded café terrace and have a few rounds of pastis, with ice. Down south they put ice in the rosé, but that might be asking too much.
Full disclosure: It does get worse when you’re old and everything is turning to mush. I recently installed a mini-split, and flip on the cooling function occasionally on days when it hits 85 degrees by 8:30. Also, I am using Firefox and can’t read the heat maps and can only imagine what they are supposed to prove, and I haven’t bothered to calculate what Celsius feels like in real life.
alfredlordbleep 07.14.26 at 1:57 pm
“We have 4 geothermal heat pumps.”—Trader Joe
Meaning drawing heat from at least 8-10 ft underground?
I used to have a property w/a 505 ft well. It would take solving a differential equation
to answer in detail the performance of the well as a heat pump source.
Anybody used a well? (etc)
Thomas Gordon Hewitt 07.14.26 at 2:50 pm
Laban,
The wite paint helps, but with modern paints it still absorbs 20-30% of the incoming solar energy. I think it’s mostly the binding materials which absorb in the near infrared range (a bit redder than visible). I have added calcium carbonate (which is essentially ground limestone), sold at pottery supply outfits. It helps a bit, seems to drop sunlit surface temps by about 5F (3C), versus standard paint. Commercial cool paint is better but it sells for approximately $100(US) per gallon, and you are supposed to put it on thick.
There are experimental Barium Sulphate paints, which can reflect 98%, but preparation of the paint is very involved, and you are supposed to use 30 thin coats. It’s sunlit surface temps are supposedly 5-10C below ambient air temps. Doesn’t sound practical to me.
I also worry, that if I do too good of a job, it might promote mold and mildew.
engels 07.15.26 at 12:48 pm
This seems relevant to the OP’s attribution of opposition to AC to “machismo”:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/05/europe-air-conditioning-culture-wars-heat-up
Fenton West 07.17.26 at 4:48 pm
I appreciated the balanced approach in this post. It’s easy for discussions about air conditioning to become overly simplistic, but you highlighted the trade-offs between public health, energy use, and climate in a thoughtful way. The comparison of different climates really put the issue into perspective and gave me a more nuanced understanding of why there’s no one-size-fits-all answer.
alfredlordbleep 07.18.26 at 10:02 pm
https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/10/brief-thoughts-on-aircon/#comment-877733:~:text=Thomas%20Gordon%20Hewitt-,07.14.26%20at%202%3A50%20pm,-Laban%2CThe
What became of this paint application (among others)?!
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/15/science/mit-scientists-turn-simple-idea-into-perfect-mirror.html
The M.I.T. scientists also envision coating windows with infrared reflecting mirrors to keep heat in or out of rooms. The mirrors could be chopped into tiny flakes and mixed with transparent paint to allow them to be applied directly to walls or windows. . .
alfredlordbleep 07.20.26 at 2:49 pm
Corrected link—
https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/10/brief-thoughts-on-aircon/#comment-877733:~:text=Thomas%20Gordon%20Hewitt%2007.14.26%20at%202%3A50%20pm
marcel proust 07.21.26 at 9:10 pm
D. S.Battistoli @ 38<\a><\b>
We have heard the chimes at mudnight, Master Battistoli.
marcel proust 07.21.26 at 9:12 pm
Damn tags. Why no preview option, eh?!!!
equalitus 08.04.26 at 12:36 am
Aircon should be powered by wind&solar on land regulated by direct democracy, and so this specific issue wouldn’t be a big problem most places.
This is related to an example of the problem definition privilege; a few guests arrive at a restaurant and asks the owner of the restaurant to arrange a table an a few chairs for them, and while there is space and a table and chairs, the owner says it’s full!
Because he is owner and decision maker he has the right to define the problem, not the arriving guests even if it is easily physically possible to arrange it so that a few more guests can sit at one more table.
Martin McGarry 08.04.26 at 11:47 am
More greenery and more water in urban areas sounds like a good idea. But it should be properly thought out. One effect of climate change is various insects (and other stuff) moving further north. Including new species of mosquito, potential vectors for various viruses. I have no scientific expertise in this area, but I have read some stuff by those who do. They favour efforts to slow down the spread of new mosquito species, in the hope that we can find better ways to deal with them, combat viruses, etc. But there seems to be no prospect of stopping or reversing the spread. And more greenery and water can improve the prospects for mosquitos, so it needs to be thought about. Maybe check out how they do things in Singapore.