The Far Right Is Right… About Air-Conditioning

Why Europe's populists are the ones trying to keep people from dying in the heat

I have a new op-ed (ungated) in the Wall Street Journal. (I didn’t pick the headline, but “Air Conditioning, Scourge of the French Left” is hard to beat, and Chad Crowe’s illustration of a café standoff over an unplugged window unit is pretty neat.)

The short version: as Europe bakes, the boldest plans to cool people come from the populist right, while much of the left treats air conditioning as a selfish indulgence and an ecological menace. Cooling people in a deadly heat wave is about as demonstrably beneficial as policy gets, which makes this one of the rare debates where the far right simply has the better of the argument.

I did not plan to become an air-conditioning expert this month. What started as one cranky take turned into a whole week of near-total fixation, and it pairs unexpectedly well with my last piece on why evidence-based policymaking is overrated. Basically, the same voices who spent the pandemic insisting we “follow the science” are now reasoning from a narrow read of climate models to the conclusion that you should just sweat it out.

A few things the op-ed only gestures at. First, this is all bigger than spoiled American tourists missing their comfort. We Americans fail at plenty of things the rest of the rich world finds baffling, from public transit to gun violence, so the point is not that the US has it all figured out. It is that almost everywhere cooling is normal, from Japan to the Americas, people look at Europe with the same sincere puzzlement: how does a continent that gets so much else right decide that a machine invented in 1902 is the one thing it cannot bring itself to use?

Second, the death toll, grim as it is, is probably the smaller part of the story. Stefan Schubert keeps making the point that deaths averted are likely a minority of the well-being lost to a lack of cooling. Heat that wrecks your sleep, your concentration, and your ability to work or study is an enormous and largely invisible cost. When someone shrugs off a heat wave as “a week of discomfort,” what they are shrugging off is billions in lost productivity and health, every summer, borne by the people least able to escape it.

Third, the debate is also missing the people best placed to settle it. It has been left largely to sustainability advocates reasoning from their picture of climate change toward conclusions about how the rest of us should live, while the quantitative social scientists who could actually measure what cooling does to human welfare, and what the public wants, have mostly stayed out. I went looking for good survey data on how Europeans feel about air conditioning and found almost nothing. What little I have come across even hints that support for cooling may run stronger on the political right, which would be its own puzzle worth taking seriously. So I will probably end up fielding some of these questions myself.

And this is finally why I keep circling back to it. People ask why I am so allergic to degrowth, and Europe’s response to the heat is the clearest answer I have. Air conditioning is just one instance of a much larger instinct: that wanting to be comfortable is a little shameful, that the rich world should consume less and endure more, that even a cool room counts as a kind of vice. The trouble is that heat waves are happening, and they will keep happening, more often and more severely. You cannot wish that away with an appeal to sobriety, and no amount of environmental concern changes the fact that a cool room is one of the cheapest and most reliable ways we have to keep people alive and well. And, as I mention in the piece, you do not have to like Marine Le Pen, or agree with her or other populists on immigration, to admit she has this one right.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think I’m getting wrong, especially if you live somewhere this fight is live. And if anyone knows of good survey data on how people outside the US actually feel about cooling, I’d be grateful to see it.