The Big Air Con Elite climate hypocrisy is not sustainable

A glance at the history and implicit ideology of air conditioning reveals that this technology began as industrial machinery, and swiftly became (at least in the United States) a domestic amenity for Everyman, on a par with indoor sanitation. It has flourished worldwide, as an enabler of economic development. And it expresses, in microcosm, the internationally homogenising power of American culture and technology.

The habitual denizens of the air it conditions, especially in airports, comprise a now-global supra-bourgeoisie. This class has come into its own in tandem with the digital and financial revolutions; its allegiance is, as conservative commentators are fond of complaining, often less to a nation than a placeless international culture of information work, buoyed by air-conditioned flights, offices and hotels, all linked by air-conditioned taxis, and facilitated by frictionless apps. Its members probably studied at Ivy League universities, but may originate from anywhere: for this aircon class, “diversity” genuinely doesn’t mean much more than minor variations in food preference, and the accent with which International Business English is delivered. This group is also, paradoxically, often at the forefront of climate-conscious and passionately egalitarian calls for global emission reductions.

But this poses a challenge: for as well as being a principal delivery mechanism for the placeless, timeless, frictionless diverse-but-homogenous and climate-controlled culture of the international bourgeoisie, aircon is also incredibly resource-hungry. Depending on how hot the ambient temperature is in any given country, cooling the air to the temperate productivity zone can be hugely expensive, in energy terms. Should it come down to a contest between Net Zero and air-conditioned comfort, which will prevail?

The story of aircon is also the story of American global hegemony. Invented in 1902 by American engineer Willis Haviland Carrier, to address summer humidity problems in a Brooklyn printing factory, aircon swiftly spread first to other factories and then to private homes. The first mass-produced domestic aircon units cost the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars; but by 1947 it was already so widespread the British scholar S.F. Markham hailed it as “the greatest contribution to civilisation in this century”. By 1979, Time reported many Americans simply took it for granted: they “no longer think of interior coolness as an amenity but consider it a necessity, almost a birthright, like suffrage”. No wonder, then, that half a century later the American Olympic team should react with horror to news that the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris proposed achieving “the greenest Games yet” by providing athletes only with passive, air-source underfloor cooling and fans.

US Olympic organisers were among a number of countries that responded by promising to supply their own air conditioning. By contrast, the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge hailed the aircon-free Paris Olympic village as a positive step in emissions reduction. But perhaps this just reflects just how unevenly distributed airport world still is: Kipchoge grew up in (and still lives in) Kenya, where only around 15% of homes have air conditioning despite average summer temperatures of 35-40°C. It’s reasonable to imagine he is less alarmed by the prospect of a warm night or two, than someone from a country where 88% of homes have it despite far lower average summer temperatures.

Kipchoge’s relaxed response to the prospect of heat also points to something discreetly masked by the seeming neutrality of aircon: the way it flattens local differences. Heat doesn’t just affect comfort: it shapes whole cultures. When you don’t have access to aircon, beyond a certain level of heat, the air stops being a backdrop to everyday life; instead, it becomes something elemental. Even well before the level of heat that threatens health, in the absence of climate control it transforms what is possible — even what is thinkable.

This is obvious at the level of architecture. For example, “riad” palaces, built for wealthy Moroccan traders before the aircon era, are constructed to maximise shade and curate hidden, refreshing luxury for the chosen few. Such buildings have few or no external windows where the sun hits, but look inward instead, to an internal courtyard usually built around a pond or fountain. It’s obvious in the way climate shapes behaviour, too: even in relatively temperate Spain, before aircon the hot summers impelled a norm of working in the early morning and late evening, with a “siesta” during the hot part of the day. (Spain has only begun to abandon this practice since the spread of aircon.)

Nor is it just cultural practices. Decades of research support the conclusion that mathematical ability, academic performance, and clarity of thought in general, are most easily sustained at airport temperatures: that is, in the mid-20s. Heat affects our emotions, too: as the New York Times put it, over a comfort threshold (again, roughly consistent with airport world norms) being hot makes us “irritable, impulsive and aggressive”. Murder, assault, and domestic violence all rise when the weather is hot.

In his travelogue A Passage to England (1959), Nirad Chaudhuri suggests that the English temperament is formed by the comparatively mild and changeable climate of the British Isles, speculating that this made the English “responsive to changes in the environment, capable of meeting surprises of all kinds […] and of taking contretemps with good humour”. Conversely, Chaudhuri argues, for the British imperial administrators, the extreme Indian heat turned a habitually temperate people into “extremists with an incredible stridency in their opinions, which became raw and crude”.

If, in Chaudhuri’s view, the heat was capable of affecting otherwise self-controlled Englishmen in this way, it invites the question: how much more of the rationalism, the work ethic, and the low-time preference commonly associated with “Western” cultural norms is at least in part the product of relatively temperate European and North American climates? Whatever the answer, studies on temperature and productivity suggest the converse is already demonstrably true. If you want rationalism and productivity to be normative, even in a hot country, you need to engineer ambient temperatures to suit.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the American empire of technology, commerce and global homogenisation began to spread roughly concurrently with the spread of air conditioning. For in practice, that’s really what “development” means: the global rollout of temperate-world lifestyles, behavioural norms, and commercial practices, underwritten by artificial climates adjusted to enable that mindset. The great Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew understood this: in a 2010 interview, he said: that, along with Singapore’s signature style of pragmatic multiculturalism, air conditioning was the single most important factor in its success, “by making development possible in the tropics”.

But this raises uncomfortable questions about the real meaning of “climate justice”. If, as Lee Kuan Yew suggested, an artificially engineered temperate climate is a precondition for the “development” referenced in the phrase “developing world”, then the unevenness of global climates is itself an injustice. As long as you understand “justice” to mean widening access to economic development, the world’s variable temperature is discriminatory to the extent that it impedes populations from being more like the denizens of airport world.

Once you add the fact that climate change is driving dangerous increases in summer heat across many parts of the world, access to cooling seems a matter of global justice for progressives. But the emissions generated by climate control are also part of what is causing temperatures to rise. Today, around 8-10% of Indian households have aircon, but International Energy Agency projections expect this to grow to 50% by 2037, impelled by steadily-rising temperatures in the country — even as the power required to operate these new units helps to accelerate the rise.

How, then, does widening access to aircon square with the need to rein in global carbon emissions for climate reasons? Is the solution a global redistribution of climate control in favour of hot countries? I suspect the US Olympic team’s response to the prospect of doing without is emblematic of the one you’d get, if you proposed to the 88% of American households with aircon that they sacrifice their cooling systems for the sake of people in Uttar Pradesh. And I also suspect that such a reaction stands as a metonym for the way “emissions reduction” will play out overall, between the aircon class and the rest.

The denizens of airport world may currently profess to be both climate-conscious and egalitarian. But this lifestyle cannot sustainably be generalised to the whole planet. And as this becomes more obvious, even the most progressive among their number will surely abandon their egalitarianism long before they switch off the aircon. After all, the only other solution would be to try and move the planet’s entire human population to the temperate zones of Europe and North America, before retreating into (presumably air-conditioned) enclaves a safe distance from the resulting chaos. And surely not even an elite blinded by aircon culture to the real depth of global human cultural differences would consider something as reckless as that.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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