The Overlooked Reason Europe Doesn’t Have AC - The Atlantic

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This summer, the transatlantic culture war has fixated on an unlikely flash point: air-conditioning.<br>Last weekend, I arrived in Paris at the beginning of the heat wave, or canicule, that has stifled the country and much of Europe. Temperatures in France have soared to record-breaking highs, reaching nearly 112 degrees Fahrenheit in certain parts of the country. Several young children have died in parked vehicles, and the French government reported earlier this week that dozens of people have drowned in waterways while seeking relief from the heat. Many more have been hospitalized. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 175,000 people die from heat-related causes each year across Europe. Although such tallies are imperfect, there is legitimate concern that this summer could be particularly lethal.<br>Some commentators in the United States have taken the opportunity to lecture Europeans, and perhaps even indulge in a little schadenfreude. “Just install the goddamn fucking AC and save your grandma’s life, Euro friends!” the popular economics writer Noah Smith posted on X. “I asked Claude about the air conditioning debate in Europe, and it really didn’t pull any punches,” Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, wrote in a viral post. The AI model told Collison that the “elaborate discourse” used to justify the scarcity of AC in Europe “is largely a way of processing the psychological discomfort of admitting that the American approach to summer was correct all along.” Elon Musk reposted the sentiment, calling it a “banger.”<br>Plenty of Americans seem scandalized that more Western Europeans don’t embrace the technological miracle of AC. But the disagreement ultimately has less to do with objective criteria—such as the effects of climate change in Europe, which is warming twice as fast as the global average—than subjective questions about what constitutes an acceptable level of physical suffering and sacrifice. As someone who splits his time between the United States and France, I’ve seen firsthand how Americans tend to interpret discomfort as a failure of infrastructure, whereas Europeans seem much more willing to regard it as part of life. These contrasting views have resulted in far too much air-conditioning on one side and not remotely enough on the other.<br>For many Parisians who are not physiologically vulnerable, the past week hasn’t been nearly as apocalyptic as media accounts have suggested. Parisians have rolled with the heat; it certainly hasn’t kept them from carrying on with their lives. Cafés and ice-cream parlors are packed. The roving outdoor Fête de la Musique last Sunday drew half a million revelers. Throughout the heat wave, men’s fashion-week parties have spilled onto the streets. My son’s school, like many in France, asked parents to keep children home due to a lack of climate control. Yet everyone I know found a way to manage, and some took turns shepherding groups of kids to pools and museums.<br>Read: Perhaps France should reconsider AC<br>Traditional French residences were designed to breathe in the summer months. Even if the architects of my building didn’t anticipate global warming, their handiwork, with some minor accommodations, has made the past week bearable. When I come indoors, I mist myself with water and drink more of it than usual. Like my neighbors, I keep my windows closed behind metal shutters to block out the midday sunlight and open them when there is a breeze in the evening. Otherwise, to keep the air from turning stagnant, I run two purifiers. I’m sure I would feel differently if I were underneath one of the heat-absorbing zinc roofs that are common in Paris, but living on the ground level, I haven’t even felt the need to buy a fan yet. The temperatures have no doubt been sweltering by French standards, but not any worse than the hottest days of my childhood summers in New Jersey or my college years in Washington, D.C.<br>I wouldn’t have noticed there was such a monumental problem had I not been plugged into X. Underneath the debate raging online is a fundamental divide about how America and Europe address discomfort. Americans have grown accustomed to treating temperature in particular and physical distress more broadly as challenges to be fixed rather than states to be endured. This is in keeping with our flattering self-conception as optimizers and pragmatists. The U.S. has spent decades engineering interior environments—offices, cars, shops, homes—in which refrigerator-like conditions are standard.<br>For many Europeans, though, the ubiquity and frigidity of air-conditioning in the U.S. play into the perception of Americans as profligate and pampered. The American big-box stores that prop their doorways open on hot days and blast polar air on passersby are a symbol of perverse excess in the eyes of Europeans, who pride themselves on small but telling displays of thrift: conserving water...