With a good part of Europe baking in the heat, the transatlantic air-conditioning debate has erupted again, at least on X. Some of the American jeering at Europe, where AC is found in only 20 percent of homes is overdone. “Traditional” European weather meant that there has been relatively little need for AC. A warming climate is changing that, but older European houses are often difficult to retrofit for AC. There are understandable historical and aesthetic concerns about what the installation of air-conditioning equipment would, if even practical, mean for the look of Europe’s venerable city centers. Electricity is also more expensive on the other side of the Atlantic.
But there are other factors holding back the spread of AC in Europe. Asceticism is one of them. AC is often frowned upon as too much of a luxury, its unseemliness made worse by its taint of Americanness. Climate warriors and other environmentalists have weighed in. No hairshirt is too uncomfortable for eco-ascetics, especially if they can force others to wear them. What’s more, they want heat to be difficult to bear, both as a punishment for the Western world’s supposed sins and to attract new recruits to their ranks.
Exasperated, Charles Darwin storms onto the page. In The Descent of Man, he quotes Alfred Russel Wallace, a man whose thinking about evolution in some respects paralleled Darwin’s. Darwin notes how Wallace explained that man is enabled through his mental faculties “to keep with an unchanged body in harmony with the changing universe.” In other words, when the natural world around him changes, man doesn’t wait to evolve, he adapts.
Darwin continued:
[Man] has great power of adapting his habits to new conditions of life. He invents weapons, tools, and various stratagems to procure food and to defend himself. When he migrates into a colder climate he uses clothes, builds sheds, and makes fires; and by the aid of fire cooks food otherwise indigestible.
Again, Humanity adapts. It always has. It aways will. There are over eight billion of us now, and we are flourishing in a fashion that was long thought to be impossible. As the climate changes, we will adapt and we will innovate in ways that, one way or another will make it less of a problem.
In 2018, Leigh Phillips, a man of the left but, when it comes to climate issues, someone on its eco-modernist, much-neglected Promethean side, wrote “In Defense of Air Conditioning” in Jacobin. Jacobin? NR alarms go off: “Step away from the laptop, Mr. Stuttaford.”
Do I agree with all of what Phillips says (not least his disapproving talk of “neoliberalism”)? Absolutely not. But the article is an intriguing read from an overlooked side in the climate debate.
Phillips dismisses the idea of AC as frivolous excess:
even outside of air-conditioning’s role as an essential, life-saving part of public health, for all of us, there is a pretty narrow range of temperature within which we are comfortable, most productive, cozy. This is no aesthetic preference or cultural artifact. It’s a product of that same biological requirement to maintain as close to optimal metabolic conditions as possible.
Air-conditioning is a product that, like many products before it, people have developed to enable them to thrive when or where they previously could not. And AC is a product of American ingenuity. It has several fathers, all from the U.S., but the most important was Willis Carrier (1876–1950). Air conditioning’s invention, development, and spread is a story of free-market capitalism at work. Carrier began his operations within another company, but within a few years he and some engineers pooled their savings. The rest is history (if not without some bumpy moments).
Phillips takes aim at some deserving targets. He admired Pope Francis for his focus on how humanity “has disrupted the ecosystem services upon which civilization depends,” not a take I would share, but then goes on to note, quite rightly, that Francis’ response:
like that of some in the environmental movement, is not a humane one. It is a morality play in which fallen man has once again committed the sins of gluttony and pride, and to be redeemed, he must learn humility before the laws of nature.
And with that comes the asceticism referred to above, much of which is performative.
Phillips:
“Air conditioning made Americans greedy and silly,” Karen Heller wrote in the Washington Post a couple summers ago [Phillips was writing in 2018]. “Once the country got hooked on central air, strange things materialized: windows that don’t open, the office sweater in August, summer colds, Las Vegas, football in Phoenix.” She then humble-bragged about her family’s “greater tolerance, lower carbon footprint and puny electric bills, which are half the temperature outside.”
… How is this not just another form of judgmental conspicuous consumption, or rather conspicuous anti-consumption? Are the homeless of Denton, Texas “greedy and silly” for rushing to an air-conditioned shelter to escape the extreme heat? Should those in New Delhi just suck it up (even if they’re liable to faint from heat exhaustion)?
Quite.
Air conditioning saves lives. It could save many more across the globe.
Given the current fusillades being exchanged over the Atlantic, it is worth noting that in the U.S., a little over 2,000 people die of “excess heat” in the U.S. each year, at least recently (the numbers have risen). That compares with over 24,000 heat-related deaths across 854 cities in Europe in 2025.
AC saves lives.