Here’s another dispatch from the AC wars, this time from the Flemish philosopher, Maarten Boudry.
It’s all worth reading, but here are some extracts, starting with this:
The economist Alan Barreca has shown that the risk of death on extremely hot days in the United States fell by roughly 75 percent over the twentieth century — a decline that happened in lockstep with the mass adoption of air conditioning after 1960. In his words: “the adoption of residential air conditioning explains essentially the entire decline in the temperature-mortality relationship.”
Part of the reason for the unwillingness of Europeans (or their governments) to embrace AC is, as I noted here, eco-asceticism made more intense by AC’s Americanness.
Boudry appears to agree:
The deeper cause is an ideological “less is more” sensibility, more potent in Europe than anywhere else, which frames artificial cooling as a decadent indulgence—something for profligate Yankees with oversized SUVs and backyard pools.
Boudry observes that this runs against the promethean approach of Marx and others on the old left of a century or more ago:
[They] dreamed of universal abundance and denounced the scarcity mindset; they wanted the masses to share in the comforts once reserved for the rich, not to ration them in the name of nature or virtue. Today’s green gospel of restraint quietly inverts that aspiration, with comfort itself becoming suspect.
Boudry is right. Marx, a millenarian crank, had other, darker dreams, but he did believe in abundance, something that explains the determination on the part of “degrowthers” to invent an eco-Marx on the basis of, mainly, a few notebooks.
But back to today, and Boudry:
In practice, Europeans of all ages are told to suck it up and sweat it out. France would sooner close its schools in a heat wave than fit them with devices that demonstrably improve concentration and learning. In the Swiss canton of Geneva, installing an air conditioner requires an exceptional permit demonstrating “real need” (such as a doctor’s certificate). During the recent energy crisis, Spain and Italy barred public buildings from cooling below 27°C — hot enough to dull your cognitive powers by 5 percent. In the midst of the current deadly heat wave, my own city of Ghent is officially advising people to “avoid air-conditioners”.
Ghent was where the local authority had suggested planting trees rather than installing AC.
It’s only fair to mention that Boudry himself is a climate criminal. He owns an “inefficient” portable device:
a wheezing box with a fat hose shoved through a rickety fabric covering the window. It is the thermodynamic equivalent of mopping the floor with the tap running, but that’s simply the direction in which Europe’s regulations have nudged me.
Shameless.
Boudry points out how under European rules, installed AC equipment will hit buildings’ energy efficiency ratings, incentivizing owners (particularly, I imagine, landlords) either to tear out that wicked machinery or not to put it in in the first place.
Naturally, WHO, that shamefully politicized health body, is also in on the act, almost writing air conditioning out of its European script, but keen on drawing the curtains on hot days.
I could easily quote much more from Boudry’s piece, but there is one passage too striking not to be included here:
This is a technophobia that costs lives, as the data scientist Hannah Ritchie observes in her book Not the End of the World. In 2020 and 2021, Western governments spent billions protecting the elderly from COVID death. Why, then, is the same vulnerable group denied a cool room in a heat wave?
A bit later, Boudry adds:
Consider that the average European burns far more carbon to stay warm in winter than to stay cool in summer — yet no politician would dream of capping the winter thermostat at 15°C, or of denouncing central heating as a decadent luxury for the soft. As Leigh Phillips wrote: “Apart from its relatively novelty, A/C is morally no different from clothing and fire.”
Quite.
As I have mentioned before, the attitude of European governments (regardless of any concerns about greenhouse gases) owes something to the fear that their overstretched electrical grids cannot cope with the extra demand caused by AC, but if this is the case, it reveals that they:
have not thought through the apocalyptic climate warnings they have been making for years. If they “knew” that much hotter heat waves were coming, they should have first upgraded their grids and built more power stations using proven technology. Instead they chose to spend billions on unreliable “renewable” energy, billions that could have been put to work in an infinitely more productive way.
Curiously (or not), these same governments have not let any such anxiety stand in the way of their efforts to force through electric vehicles.
Underlining Europe’s AC aversion is a reluctance to acknowledge how great a role that adaptation can play — as it has done in the past — in humanity’s adjustment to an unhelpful climate. But it is also undeniable that there is a quasi-religious element running through this embrace of unnecessary suffering. As I argued the other day:
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.
Boudry looks at what is going on and sees it as a form of “secular penance.”
Pretty much.