'The anti-AC lobby remains stubbornly in favor of heatwaves.' (Yui Mok/Getty)
At their sweltering zeniths, British heatwaves exert strange and intriguing thermodynamic effects. Asphalt turns to liquid. Air becomes flame. Wheelie bins transubstantiate into single-player swimming pools. How, as temperatures rise again, can we cope?
Authorities issue orders to drink water, stay in the shade, stay at home, use a fan and so on. One scientist even suggested coating windows with yogurt. It’s easily spreadable, he argued, dries quickly, and can be removed with water and cloth. In straitened circumstances, the idea might make some sense.
But it seems anachronistic that we must rely on fans, yogurt and wheelie bins when, as much of the world has understood for many decades, the best defense against a heatwave is air conditioning.
This relatively simple physical mechanism has become the locus of rather more complex social conflicts. In the more innocent time that was the year 2015, AC became a battleground of the gender wars. “Air conditioning in your office is sexist,” read one headline, beneath which a writer argued that her workplace, that of the Telegraph newspaper, was kept at a temperature suitable for men (strolling around in their shirtsleeves) rather than women (huddled under communal jumpers).
The problem of sexist air conditioning remains unresolved, but the culture wars have metastasized. Already accused of being unfeminist, AC is now viewed in some quarters as being an example of “climate colonialism”, where Western standards of comfort, and the energy-hungry practices and buildings needed to maintain them, supersede non-Western architectural styles that might result in lower emissions. Perhaps, these critics suggest, it is time to use courtyards and organic materials rather than glass-and-steel monoliths.
Sometimes this line of thinking veers into patronizing deference to anything non-Western and pre-industrial. “How can we learn from indigenous technologies,” asked a Guardian contributor during the 40°C heatwave of 2022, “that better incorporate collective management of resources and collaborate with natural systems?” He suggested we consider an irrigation system native to the steep terraces of rice paddies in Bali. Granted, there is a prelapsarian charm to the idea of water gushing down the great residential ziggurats of central London, slaking the endless thirst of a Babylonian hanging garden of shade-bestowing greenery. But to re-engineer the West’s housing stock into irrigated rice paddy terraces would be the work not only of decades, but also gigatons of carbon emissions.
A more practical solution, from this anti-colonial, pro-environment perspective, is simply not to use air conditioning at all. By now, of course, AC is used on a vast scale outside the West; even Chinese pigs, which are generally treated notoriously poorly, sometimes enjoy cooler air than European commuters. Nevertheless, the view on the European Left is that most Europeans should endure heatwaves without AC, that the hottest summers on record should simply be rawdogged. France’s Right-wing National Rally wants to install AC across the country; the Left is scandalized. “We must absolutely not install air conditioning everywhere,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, in June. “That would only make things worse.” The Left minds its own business, of course, when it comes to the soaring third-world use of AC. The Global South does what it will; Europe’s aged Boomers, conscripted into a continental display of self-flagellation, suffer what they must.
A softer form of this strain of thinking, but one that is nonetheless real, has made AC practically impossible to put into British newbuilds. To qualify for AC, a building must first satisfy the demanding requirements of the “cooling hierarchy”. Is the design of your house energy-efficient? Are the windows thick cuboids of plastic? Are there plants on the roof? Are the ceilings high? Are there solar panels on the roof as well as plants? Fail to comply and your council will order you to tear out the AC and open your windows instead.
With air conditioning now demarcated as a Right-wing technology, Americans mock overheated Europeans and joke about turning down their own ACs so low that they wake up cold. The war over air-conditioning is therefore a mirror to the faults of its antagonists: the know-nothing Right revels in its own selfishness, while the anti-Western Left finds ever-more inventive outlets for its narcissistic illiberalism.
How do we find our way out of this morass? Heat pumps, a favorite of the British establishment, are not the answer. In winter, Britons like warmth to come from plumbing rather than from vents. This means that our heat pumps are built into that plumbing, which makes them incapable of cooling. The only answer is air conditioning.
Fortunately for overheated Britons, the harms of AC are rapidly diminishing. Earlier types of AC unit used refrigerants that were potent greenhouse gases, but newer models use less damaging alternatives and are less liable to leak. As for the power consumed by the AC unit, there is no reason that it need be derived from fossil fuels. By definition, AC is required when the sun is at its hottest — which is, of course, when solar power is at its most useful. Without fossil fuels, our dysfunctionally decarbonized grid would find it impossible to warm our homes over winter; but in summer, cooling the same homes should be less of a challenge.
For that reason, the war over air conditioning has a good claim to being the culture wars’ stupidest excrescence yet. America aside, the Western public is broadly sympathetic to policy measures designed to curb global warming, but that sympathy is not inscribed in stone. If it becomes clear that ideology rather than righteous parsimony is responsible for our sweaty offices, restless bedrooms, and menaced grandparents, then the ideology itself will be threatened. Buoyed by the support of a well-intentioned public, the Left has dangerously overreached in its hostility to air conditioning, just as it has dangerously overreached with regard to multiculturalism and Net Zero.
Europe and Britain still hope, perhaps, to set a virtuous example to the rest of the world, to atone for the original sin of industrialization and to demonstrate our moral superiority. But nobody will follow us into a sweltering cul-de-sac; air conditioning is a technology of tremendous importance to a country’s prosperity and wellbeing. In one of his first acts as Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew had AC installed in buildings where his civil service worked, hailing it as “key to public efficiency”. China, thanks in part to government subsidies, has more home AC units than it has homes. Even today, the US Government conducts, via its National Labs, its own work on AC, attempting to make it cheaper and more effective.
If a continent decides, instead, to become a 4,000-square mile armpit, it should not be surprised if it inspires few imitators. In the 21st century, we find it unconscionable that the Aztecs cut out prisoners’ hearts to feed the sun god; but we ourselves are sacrificing our elderly to that same god’s heat.
If Europe and Britain were to play to their strengths, they would be optimizing air-conditioning technology. And rather than settle for the ugly units that blemish the exteriors of American homes, the Old World could find more tasteful ways of retrofitting the technology — even combining it, as per the progressive academics, with what we might call indigenous European building styles.
And if the anti-AC lobby remains stubbornly in favor of heatwaves au naturel, then it should bear in mind an additional expression of thermodynamics. No matter how much of it is produced, hot air will always dissipate.