Europe Needs Air Conditioning
Sorry if I'm boring any Europeans with this observation
Dear readers,
I love air conditioning so much that I named my podcast after it. And one of the things I love about the United States is that virtually any building you enter is going to be air conditioned — whatever the weather outside, it’s 72 degrees inside.
Lots of people are talking about air conditioning this week because Europe is currently suffering through a heat wave. The United States gets heat waves too, but Europe is suffering because only about 20% of homes on the continent are air-conditioned. And we’re seeing coping strategies that are quite embarrassing for a continent that is, jokes aside, quite wealthy. Parisians are drawing the curtains and keeping their homes in total darkness all day to conserve cool air and, when that fails, swimming in canals where they find algae-covered bicycles and shopping carts at the bottom.1 It hurts my heart to see this happening in what is otherwise the world’s most elegant city, and I just want Europeans to get the air conditioning they deserve.
Europe is not actually poor. Japan is about as wealthy as Europe, and almost all Japanese homes are air-conditioned. Europeans could afford to air-condition their homes (and their hospitals!) just like the Japanese do. But even if an individual European wants to buy an AC unit, local regulatory bodies often step in to block them. In London, the Camden Council, for example, may demand evidence that you exhausted other options on the “cooling hierarchy,” such as ceiling fans, before you’re allowed to install air conditioning. Authorities in Geneva require a doctor’s note before you can air condition your own private home. Just as importantly, many European consumers have convinced themselves that conditioned air is undesirable: some of them, honest-to-god, believe AC causes dangerous “thermal shock” (« choc thermique ») to the body and that it is safer to just suffer in the heat.
There is also a political element: while leftists in the United States seek to establish a human right to air conditioning, French leftists dismiss air conditioning as right-wing. This is a reason I’m proud to be American: the American right loves to complain about the American left promising “free stuff,” but at least our right and our left are both in favor of stuff.
Meanwhile, European leftists explicitly advocate that people should be kept poor, uncomfortable, and literally sweating. I would take our left over their left any day!
Some Europeans are bored of hearing Americans talk about this. Mike Bird of The Economist (an Englishman living in New York, where he gets to enjoy widespread air conditioning) proposes a certification program where Europeans can admit that America is right about air conditioning and, thereafter, have a legal right to be spared further lectures on the subject. This is an idea that could only come from the continent that gave us the GDPR, but in the spirit of not boring Mike, I’d like to voluntarily offer a list of other things Europe could learn about from America besides HVAC:
Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit is better than Celsius because you only need to look at the first digit of a Fahrenheit temperature to understand how hot it is. Nobody knows what “37 degrees Celsius” means, but everyone knows if the Fahrenheit temperature starts with a 9 or a 10, you’d better crank that AC up to high.
Automatic transmission. In Europe, you have to select a car’s gears manually. In America, the car does this for you.
Clothes dryers that work. In America, I put my clothes in a machine, and they come out dry. In Britain, you put your clothes in a machine and they come out damp, and must be hung around your house (because the climate is too wet for outdoor drying!) until they finally give up their moisture. This is apparently driven by perverse consumer preference. We had London resident Sam Bowman on Central Air a few weeks back and he admitted he’s afraid to use his tumble dryer because he’s concerned it will burn the house down. Europeans also all seem to think dryers destroy clothes — if that’s the case, why aren’t Americans naked all the time? Meanwhile, the best dryers don’t actually come from the US anymore, but from Korea — perhaps Samsung and LG need to fund a public education campaign.
Ice. It’s incredibly scarce in Europe. Restaurants will bring you room-temperature water with no ice, and if you ask for ice, they’ll often bring you just a couple of cubes. Why don’t Europeans want their cold beverages to be cold? Is there a broad bias on the continent against any kind of appliance that uses a compressor?
Free refills. If your drink is pleasantly cold, you may want to drink more of it; in America, we have a system where the staff just brings you more beverage, for free.
Cocktails. If you have ice, you can make them, and you don’t have to drink wine all the time.
Free text messages. Why are all of you on WhatsApp? Annoying.
There are things America can learn from Europe, too. Many European countries are much better than America at cost-effective subway tunnel construction (not Britain though — womp, womp.) You also have a lot more elevators per capita, because elevators are the rare part of the economy where Europeans have embraced market dynamism while Americans choose overregulation and labor market rigidity. The food is also often very good in Europe (again, less so in Britain).
Later this summer, I will be traveling to Europe in the spirit of cultural exchange. I hope to spread the good news about American prosperity while learning of new areas where Europeans have something to teach us. My hope is that it will no longer be quite so hot by the time I arrive.
Very seriously,
Josh
Say what you will about the troubled Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, at least nobody is bathing in it.
I expected this to be a relatively harmless and lighthearted laugh-at-the-euros post, but the idea that I would have to go before some governmental busybody to justify the purchase of my own f**king air conditioner for my own f**king home--it's legitimately shocking.
Is this North Korea? Do I have enough Chairman Xi Social Credit Buxx to get party-level access to the strategic heat pump stockpile in the back room?
Another thing is that much of Europe is a lot more pleasant to travel around than much of the US because they don't have endless, ugly urban sprawl everywhere. I know this is to some degree the flip side of housing shortages (in some countries anyway). But everything is a tradeoff, and this is the positive side of the ledger, and one can acknowledge it for what it is.