Nice and balanced piece, Helen! I'll happily concede the point about cultural tradition and the European "way of life" (also highlighted by Noah Smith) — something I probably underestimated in my own piece (maartenboudry.substack.…).
But even if climate anxiety isn't the main driver of resistance among individual homeowners, it very much is at the level of government regulation and elite discourse.
Governments keep discouraging it — including my own city of Ghent, which just told us in the midst of a deadly heatwave to "avoid air conditioning." Energy ratings penalise A/C regardless of aesthetics or location. Permitting is cumbersome and sometimes refused outright. In the UK, perfectly functional units are even ripped out. Silly urban myths about "cold shock" and "spreading viruses" still hold sway.
And in the media, A/C is constantly portrayed as a guilty indulgence — a last resort once you've tried everything else. Many articles on coping with heat don't even mention it, or rush to point out that it "only fights the symptoms," stressing the climate impact, exaggerating the urban heat island effect, fretting over refrigerants, and so on.
That whole framing is downstream of energy degrowth and climate anxiety — even when the person sweating at home has never heard the word "degrowth." European culture absorbs the moralising it marinates in.
Fix the grid and drop the moralism, and I think we'll quickly discover that being cool is rather nice.
Also true that most of the overheated X discourse about A/C is people yelling past each other. Hope this helps. 😉
This moralizing, as an American, is what I've seen amplified in the discourse, and is what I react to the most. Maybe its not representative as Helen says, but I sure have seen a hell of a lot of comments defending energy poverty and degrowth as virtuous, implying that anyone who prioritizes comfort is morally deficient and contributing to the problem (a problem that cannot be solved at the point of energy consumption anyway).
It was the same with hearing about "Korean fan death". Don't use a fan at night, I don't care, but stop claiming it will make you sick or kill you by taking your oxygen away, and stop pretending to be more informed or health conscious by abstaining.
Yeah. Most people have no interest in moralising about air conditioning. Most people aren’t interested in the discourse or even aware there is one. It might be a bit like “woke” where it could seem like this discourse is everywhere but only about 8% of people are progressive activists and that category includes people like me.
Yes. I can comment on both what people write on the internet and say in real life. I didn’t mean to imply that you should not comment on anything or should be able to comment on conversations you have no way of hearing. Did it sound like I was? I was just adding context.
Oh no, not at all. You are fine. I was just observing that if most people don’t have a strong opinion on something that lack of opinion doesn’t get expressed. The void is filled by those with strong opinions. It is weird how almost all the people with opinions strong enough to chime in range from not wanting AC for practical reasons to being virulently anti AC, unless from Spain or the Balkans.
In the same vein, it is puzzling to me that it is a matter of great importance to “the right” (I use scare quotes just because it is so hard for me to pretend that neither an appreciation for nature nor conservation was ever an important part, possibly the main part, of conservatism) to locate hypocrisy in those who are concerned about climate change.
To make people the subject, as if we were all godless humanists alone on the planet.
Now a fellow may not believe in climate change, or may not care about the consequences or may believe them to be an improvement, up to and including species loss. That’s a matter of indifference to me.
But taking the matter dispassionately, granting that it is a thing to the people to whom it is a thing - how on earth could anyone who’s not a midwit, ever imagine that hypocrisy is the salient issue?
“But even if climate anxiety isn't the main driver of resistance among individual homeowners, it very much is at the level of government regulation and elite discourse.”
Exactly.
Helen doesn’t seem to grok how difficult it is to install AC in Paris…
They're likely spending that money on other things, though. I think if we get enough long hot spells, it'll become more of a priority. As it is, the heatwave is generally over before a unit could be delivered or installed and people who said "We really must get air con" during it forget how horrible it was and find better things to spend their money on.
I think it's more that culturally we haven't adjusted to how cheap stuff is now. When I was a kid, TVs seemed really expensive but prices have fallen massively, especially compared to things like rent. I get whole house set ups are pricy (I am in the process of getting one), but £300 for a portable unit is genuinely a bargain compared to not sleeping for days at a time. I get not everyone can afford it but millions can, and there’s some cultural block that stops them before they even think about the numbers.
Helen - Thank you for, once again, injecting cool logic into a (curiously) heated argument.
There are two items I'll contribute (my two cents, as it were).
One, the ubiquity of air conditioning in the US. The country covers multiple climate zones, with varying numbers of uncomfortably hot days. Yet (I just checked), you CANNOT buy a new car anywhere in America without air conditioning built in. (Yes, no matter how cheap or stripped-down the car is.) 98% of all newly completed single-family homes come equipped with central air conditioning systems from the builder. The only office buildings that do not have air conditioning are in landmark-protected buildings, and they represent an infinitesimal portion of the overall office space. So unless someone chooses to actively turn off the AC in their house and car, average Americans spend their entire lives in air-conditioned comfort. It is no longer a choice or an additional expense. It is built into every area that may be occupied by people.
Two, the perception of the European reasons for not following the US model. Few Americans realize just how drastically the European summer experience differs from the American one. While most northern and midwestern American cities, like New York and Chicago, experience around 20 days of above-90° (32°C) heat, northern and central European cities are subjected to only a handful of them (London: <5, Paris: <10). For southern cities, the difference is even greater: Rome - 30-40 days of extreme heat; Houston: 100+, Phoenix: 150+!! So, as you stated, the cost/benefit equation is highly divergent. Yet, people don't understand why the Europeans don't just install AC and quit bellyaching about the (few) hot days. And since the correct, factual understanding eludes them, they invent other motivations, far less favorable: socialism, progressive attitudes, climate hysteria, etc. Plus, (most) everyone likes to feel smug and superior, so that attitude seeps in as well.
Very true. Where I live in Texas, we have 90-100 days > 32 C. We would never live without air conditioning. But you know what we DO live without? Snow plows. We could use those for a couple of days every 2-3 years, so we just live without them and wait for the snow to melt. But they are a necessity in northern parts of the U.S. (where a/c is optional).
Tangentially related, I've been advocating for years for schools in southern states to observe a different school calendar than the northern US. Summers in the south are brutal, and it is miserable (and sometimes dangerous) to do activities outdoors. Fall, on the other hand, is wonderful! If we shifted our "summer break" into the fall, we could do a lot more things outdoors during that time. But alas, the entire country remains chained to the ideal calendar for the northern states.
I have some anecdotal evidence on the opportunity for community provided by extreme weather in the UK. The winter of 2010 was particularly brutal; airports were shut down, and thousands of people trying to leave were trapped. Instead of coming home to the US, I ended up taking one of the few trains still running to Manchester. Here's the thing, though: the train I got on wasn't my train, so I was sitting in someone else's seat. Because all the trains were packed, I just assumed that the real ticket holder would oust me, and--grateful to get out at all--I'd happily stand. Nobody asked for their seat. Instead, the train, packed with people sitting in the aisle and standing at the ends of each car, was abuzz with jovial chat. As an American, I was shocked. When I arrived in Manchester, my friends were puzzled at my surprise. They asked what people would have been doing in the US. Um, many would have been furious--at the weather and then at each other. There would have been much shouting into cell phones. And the owner of the seat I was in definitely would have told me where to go. When everything goes sideways, I'd like to be with a bunch of Brits. Also: the humor!
I think it’s just passing retaliation. Europeans routinely criticize and condescend to Americans on various flaws. Europe’s heat deaths are preventable, and there does seem to be some unreasonable resistance, so many Americans would find this a fair, hypocritical target to highlight. I’m not endorsing it; I’m just offering an explanation.
Well, Americans would be most likely to see and take note of condescending attitudes towards Americans, of course. I don’t see it. I see a subset of Americans constantly going on about how London now has no go zones and stabbings occur constantly (violent crime has halved in the last 30 years) and now our decisions about AC are a problem. I blame figures like Elon Musk.
This is the answer. Americans have been condescended to by Europeans for decades about our lack of state healthcare and loose firearms regulations, so when we learn that preventable European heat deaths dwarf our murder rate it's hard to resist rubbing it in. We do the same thing to Canada over MAID deaths for the same reason.
Almost all of Europe’s heat deaths are just very elderly people and frail whose life expectancy is mostly months otherwise. That’s a great argument for more a/c in care homes and hospitals but not really anywhere else. Also nobody really knows what US heat deaths are because you don’t record them in the same way we do here.
I'm with HP on this - there's a lot of strawmanning going on - I too have never met someone who is 'anti-ac'. I know many people who make a personal choice not to have it - this is usually for a range of reasons: cost, need (USA is generally hotter than Europe), aesthetics, environmental concerns. On the latter some are no doubt confused and/or hypocritical (they are fine with heating, drive a gas guzzler etc) - but this is not a rare quality - as HP points out, many of the anti-anti-ac crowd do not believe in state intervention, nor telling people how to live their lives, but....
The US is going through a particular period of self-doubt, feeling unloved, having a serious case of affluenza concurrent with declining status). Some seem to deal with this by projecting outwards - belittling those who 'say they are better', the Euro Libtards. Not a rare phenom anywhere, but American culture is perhaps a little more prone to it though - they are not used to being humble, and many are not well travelled - leaving them vulnerable to beleiving daft claims about foreigners.
I'm not sure it's true that American are "not well traveled." Or that Americans are notably less well traveled than citizens of other countries. Google tells me that in any given year, 6-7% of Americans will travel to Europe, while 5% of Europeans travel to America.
America is a geographically large country, and our state-to-state travel is probably roughly equivalent to Europeans traveling country to county in Europe and the UK. Granted, there are norms within a single, large country, but there are also tremendous differences between regions in the US (yes, some of which don't have a/c because they don't really need it).
Good post, but it glosses over the obvious. It simply isn’t as continuously hot in the UK during summer as it is in almost every American city. Most Americans don’t understand this, and most Brits don’t seem to either, so they are talking past each other. The temperature here is scorching for a lot more than 10 days a year.
Most of the Brits commenting here - and HP herself - seem to miss that the UK is not the only country in Europe, and that the issue is bigger / more salient on the continent than in Britain.
Try installing AC in your Paris apartment and you’ll find government makes it not so easy…
To me all these posts in X rather read as a targeted bot-based anti-Europe hit campaign. As you point out, why would American conservatives care about the health of elderly and vulnerable Europeans? These waves of anti-Europe posts come out on such a regular basis that I cannot see them as anything else than coordinated attacks. And after all, Musks algorithm pushes anything depicting Europe as this failing decrepit continent.
Anyhow, I completely agree with your arguments. Great article!
"AN American on a trip of a lifetime to Europe is hoping it will be crime-ridden, poverty-stricken and without air conditioning.
Trump supporter Jordan Gardner of North Carolina cannot wait to find out if Europe is as poor, backwards, filthy and full of dumb, ugly liberals as his friends online tell him it is.
He said: “I land in Londonistan at 4pm, and I’m hoping to get my phone snatched by illegals on motor scooters by 4.45pm at the latest.
“I’ve made sure to book into a hotel without air conditioning, which the asshole limeys have never even heard of, and then I’ll go to a ‘pub’ where the beer will be warm and Millwall fans will ‘boot my nut in’ when I tell them their sport is gay. Looking forward to it!
“After that I go to France, where they don’t even speak goddamn English, and Germany where they’d be speaking German if it wasn’t for us. I’ll see the Eiffel Tower which isn’t as tall as Freedom Tower, the Mona Lisa which sucks, and I’ll knock down the Berlin Wall.
“During all of that I hope to be mugged, drugged and if possible sodomised by Islamic invaders who’ve taken over the continent and turned it into a cesspit. I’ve scheduled that as a livestream.
“Finally, I’ll turn down all socialist healthcare, drag my broken, bleeding, overheated body onto a flight home, arrive in the wonderful 64ºF US and attend the US Semiquincentennial grateful I was smart enough to be born American. I hope Trump rambles.”
I’m actually more confused by the lack of window screens than the lack of air conditioning. Even when you buy new PVC windows they don’t have screens. There are more bugs and dust in Cambridge than there are in San Francisco and yet in their latter every home has screens. My mother (in Somerset) conducts massive fly swatting campaigns a whenever it’s hot and they have the windows open. It seems you can’t even get screens as an option if you want them.
Mind you, both window screens and domestic AC became popular first in the US South as a public health measure against malaria. By the time either option became possible malaria was already gone from the UK. This might be relevant. But with longer and hotter hot spells, there’s a public health reason now.
It feels similar to most Americans not having electric kettles. We could attack America for its pathetic 120V mains electricity supply meaning kettles take longer to boil. Proper countries have 240V! Or we could just accept they have a different culture and have made different choices.
Kettles are cheaper than AC though. I might consider AC if I owned the house I live in, but I don’t. I might also invest in better insulation to keep the place warm in winter. There again, I might not. Mostly it’s neither extremely hot nor extremely cold in Britain. We have (or had) a temperate climate. Much of the US regularly experiences extreme heat and extreme cold.
We don't drink enough tea to justify kettles for a tea ritual when a microwave will do just fine and makes the exact same water.
However, as an American, I won't defend our measly 120V outlets as the best out of all the informed possible options, or as the only ecologically responsible choice. The more energy, the better, generally, and I won't be found defending the technologically inferior option. Hell, I've adopted bidets in my house and will never go without one now.
I don’t drink that much tea but I’d also use the kettle to boil water for coffee or for cooking pasta, rice, noodles or vegetables. That I suppose makes sense when boiling a kettle is quicker and easier than the alternatives.
I use an electric kettle for pre-heating water for cooking on the stovetop and also for getting hot water for the sink to wash dishes (don't have to waste cold water running down the drain waiting for the hot). I also use it to boil water in the wintertime to thaw out the cats' water bowl. So many uses for the electric kettle...
Oh, and I sometimes I even use it for making teal!
Re. “It seems probable that people doing this are giving the culturally common European indifference towards air conditioning a much more loaded political or philosophical significance than it really has”
I think another part of this is that there’s a small cottage industry for online content saying ‘look how backwards American is compared to Europe’ (gun deaths/healthcare/canned chicken etc.) I can imagine that for a certain type of very online Americans who has been exposed to a lot of this content the opportunity to sling some mud back across the pond is incredibly appealing.
Understandable and fair, in context. The context being social media shitposting, of course. It's when it starts coming in the guise of serious punditry... well, I'll refrain from psychoanalyzing (and oh, there's a lot I could say about the type of person who does it) but "stop being weird" nails the correct response.
Though I take the point about the Twitter/X users being jerks (something not unheard of for Americans and others, especially on that platform), I do think it should be noted that as far as I can tell nobody is proposing/already implemented any kind of AC mandate. I certainly don't condone shaming people in order to get them to use it - generally not a prosocial method in practice. On the other hand, many European countries DO appear to have anti-AC laws/regulations. Imagine a country where you had to apply for a government permit in order to NOT drink alcohol? Or be required to get a doctor's note in order to NOT smoke cigarettes? Or weren't legally permitted to use a seat belt when driving on a historic road? Such laws and regulations are definitely illiberal when applied to AC as well.
I once had dinner with a British diplomat in Borneo. There are insects everywhere in Borneo, though most are perfectly harmless. They poured through the open window in their multitudes, attracted to the lights. When I asked my host why he didn't install screens he replied that screens prevented airflow, a fact known to all those who live in England where there are no bugs. I explained that I live in rural Florida where human habitation would be impossible without screen and air conditioning.. He concluded that I was just another American ignoramus.
Nice and balanced piece, Helen! I'll happily concede the point about cultural tradition and the European "way of life" (also highlighted by Noah Smith) — something I probably underestimated in my own piece (maartenboudry.substack.…).
But even if climate anxiety isn't the main driver of resistance among individual homeowners, it very much is at the level of government regulation and elite discourse.
Governments keep discouraging it — including my own city of Ghent, which just told us in the midst of a deadly heatwave to "avoid air conditioning." Energy ratings penalise A/C regardless of aesthetics or location. Permitting is cumbersome and sometimes refused outright. In the UK, perfectly functional units are even ripped out. Silly urban myths about "cold shock" and "spreading viruses" still hold sway.
And in the media, A/C is constantly portrayed as a guilty indulgence — a last resort once you've tried everything else. Many articles on coping with heat don't even mention it, or rush to point out that it "only fights the symptoms," stressing the climate impact, exaggerating the urban heat island effect, fretting over refrigerants, and so on.
That whole framing is downstream of energy degrowth and climate anxiety — even when the person sweating at home has never heard the word "degrowth." European culture absorbs the moralising it marinates in.
Fix the grid and drop the moralism, and I think we'll quickly discover that being cool is rather nice.
Also true that most of the overheated X discourse about A/C is people yelling past each other. Hope this helps. 😉
This moralizing, as an American, is what I've seen amplified in the discourse, and is what I react to the most. Maybe its not representative as Helen says, but I sure have seen a hell of a lot of comments defending energy poverty and degrowth as virtuous, implying that anyone who prioritizes comfort is morally deficient and contributing to the problem (a problem that cannot be solved at the point of energy consumption anyway).
It was the same with hearing about "Korean fan death". Don't use a fan at night, I don't care, but stop claiming it will make you sick or kill you by taking your oxygen away, and stop pretending to be more informed or health conscious by abstaining.
Yeah. Most people have no interest in moralising about air conditioning. Most people aren’t interested in the discourse or even aware there is one. It might be a bit like “woke” where it could seem like this discourse is everywhere but only about 8% of people are progressive activists and that category includes people like me.
Unfortunately, as with all social media topics, I can only react to what I've seen written out, not what people refrain from commenting on.
Yes. I can comment on both what people write on the internet and say in real life. I didn’t mean to imply that you should not comment on anything or should be able to comment on conversations you have no way of hearing. Did it sound like I was? I was just adding context.
Oh no, not at all. You are fine. I was just observing that if most people don’t have a strong opinion on something that lack of opinion doesn’t get expressed. The void is filled by those with strong opinions. It is weird how almost all the people with opinions strong enough to chime in range from not wanting AC for practical reasons to being virulently anti AC, unless from Spain or the Balkans.
Yeah, I have just had another post on this.
In the same vein, it is puzzling to me that it is a matter of great importance to “the right” (I use scare quotes just because it is so hard for me to pretend that neither an appreciation for nature nor conservation was ever an important part, possibly the main part, of conservatism) to locate hypocrisy in those who are concerned about climate change.
To make people the subject, as if we were all godless humanists alone on the planet.
Now a fellow may not believe in climate change, or may not care about the consequences or may believe them to be an improvement, up to and including species loss. That’s a matter of indifference to me.
But taking the matter dispassionately, granting that it is a thing to the people to whom it is a thing - how on earth could anyone who’s not a midwit, ever imagine that hypocrisy is the salient issue?
How can minds be that little?
“But even if climate anxiety isn't the main driver of resistance among individual homeowners, it very much is at the level of government regulation and elite discourse.”
Exactly.
Helen doesn’t seem to grok how difficult it is to install AC in Paris…
A lot of is people being cheap. No way anyone would accept modern living without a fridge.
They're likely spending that money on other things, though. I think if we get enough long hot spells, it'll become more of a priority. As it is, the heatwave is generally over before a unit could be delivered or installed and people who said "We really must get air con" during it forget how horrible it was and find better things to spend their money on.
I think it's more that culturally we haven't adjusted to how cheap stuff is now. When I was a kid, TVs seemed really expensive but prices have fallen massively, especially compared to things like rent. I get whole house set ups are pricy (I am in the process of getting one), but £300 for a portable unit is genuinely a bargain compared to not sleeping for days at a time. I get not everyone can afford it but millions can, and there’s some cultural block that stops them before they even think about the numbers.
Helen - Thank you for, once again, injecting cool logic into a (curiously) heated argument.
There are two items I'll contribute (my two cents, as it were).
One, the ubiquity of air conditioning in the US. The country covers multiple climate zones, with varying numbers of uncomfortably hot days. Yet (I just checked), you CANNOT buy a new car anywhere in America without air conditioning built in. (Yes, no matter how cheap or stripped-down the car is.) 98% of all newly completed single-family homes come equipped with central air conditioning systems from the builder. The only office buildings that do not have air conditioning are in landmark-protected buildings, and they represent an infinitesimal portion of the overall office space. So unless someone chooses to actively turn off the AC in their house and car, average Americans spend their entire lives in air-conditioned comfort. It is no longer a choice or an additional expense. It is built into every area that may be occupied by people.
Two, the perception of the European reasons for not following the US model. Few Americans realize just how drastically the European summer experience differs from the American one. While most northern and midwestern American cities, like New York and Chicago, experience around 20 days of above-90° (32°C) heat, northern and central European cities are subjected to only a handful of them (London: <5, Paris: <10). For southern cities, the difference is even greater: Rome - 30-40 days of extreme heat; Houston: 100+, Phoenix: 150+!! So, as you stated, the cost/benefit equation is highly divergent. Yet, people don't understand why the Europeans don't just install AC and quit bellyaching about the (few) hot days. And since the correct, factual understanding eludes them, they invent other motivations, far less favorable: socialism, progressive attitudes, climate hysteria, etc. Plus, (most) everyone likes to feel smug and superior, so that attitude seeps in as well.
Very true. Where I live in Texas, we have 90-100 days > 32 C. We would never live without air conditioning. But you know what we DO live without? Snow plows. We could use those for a couple of days every 2-3 years, so we just live without them and wait for the snow to melt. But they are a necessity in northern parts of the U.S. (where a/c is optional).
Tangentially related, I've been advocating for years for schools in southern states to observe a different school calendar than the northern US. Summers in the south are brutal, and it is miserable (and sometimes dangerous) to do activities outdoors. Fall, on the other hand, is wonderful! If we shifted our "summer break" into the fall, we could do a lot more things outdoors during that time. But alas, the entire country remains chained to the ideal calendar for the northern states.
Would alleviate a lot of congestion at all the popular family vacation destinations.
Alas, as likely to happen as businesses staggering work hours in major cities to shorten commute times.
Absolutely. These things make a lot of sense so we're definitely not going to do them.
The silver lining for me is that I don't have any kids so I take my vacations in the fall when the weather is nice and everyone else is in school!
I have some anecdotal evidence on the opportunity for community provided by extreme weather in the UK. The winter of 2010 was particularly brutal; airports were shut down, and thousands of people trying to leave were trapped. Instead of coming home to the US, I ended up taking one of the few trains still running to Manchester. Here's the thing, though: the train I got on wasn't my train, so I was sitting in someone else's seat. Because all the trains were packed, I just assumed that the real ticket holder would oust me, and--grateful to get out at all--I'd happily stand. Nobody asked for their seat. Instead, the train, packed with people sitting in the aisle and standing at the ends of each car, was abuzz with jovial chat. As an American, I was shocked. When I arrived in Manchester, my friends were puzzled at my surprise. They asked what people would have been doing in the US. Um, many would have been furious--at the weather and then at each other. There would have been much shouting into cell phones. And the owner of the seat I was in definitely would have told me where to go. When everything goes sideways, I'd like to be with a bunch of Brits. Also: the humor!
I think it’s just passing retaliation. Europeans routinely criticize and condescend to Americans on various flaws. Europe’s heat deaths are preventable, and there does seem to be some unreasonable resistance, so many Americans would find this a fair, hypocritical target to highlight. I’m not endorsing it; I’m just offering an explanation.
Well, Americans would be most likely to see and take note of condescending attitudes towards Americans, of course. I don’t see it. I see a subset of Americans constantly going on about how London now has no go zones and stabbings occur constantly (violent crime has halved in the last 30 years) and now our decisions about AC are a problem. I blame figures like Elon Musk.
This is the answer. Americans have been condescended to by Europeans for decades about our lack of state healthcare and loose firearms regulations, so when we learn that preventable European heat deaths dwarf our murder rate it's hard to resist rubbing it in. We do the same thing to Canada over MAID deaths for the same reason.
Almost all of Europe’s heat deaths are just very elderly people and frail whose life expectancy is mostly months otherwise. That’s a great argument for more a/c in care homes and hospitals but not really anywhere else. Also nobody really knows what US heat deaths are because you don’t record them in the same way we do here.
I'm with HP on this - there's a lot of strawmanning going on - I too have never met someone who is 'anti-ac'. I know many people who make a personal choice not to have it - this is usually for a range of reasons: cost, need (USA is generally hotter than Europe), aesthetics, environmental concerns. On the latter some are no doubt confused and/or hypocritical (they are fine with heating, drive a gas guzzler etc) - but this is not a rare quality - as HP points out, many of the anti-anti-ac crowd do not believe in state intervention, nor telling people how to live their lives, but....
The US is going through a particular period of self-doubt, feeling unloved, having a serious case of affluenza concurrent with declining status). Some seem to deal with this by projecting outwards - belittling those who 'say they are better', the Euro Libtards. Not a rare phenom anywhere, but American culture is perhaps a little more prone to it though - they are not used to being humble, and many are not well travelled - leaving them vulnerable to beleiving daft claims about foreigners.
I'm not sure it's true that American are "not well traveled." Or that Americans are notably less well traveled than citizens of other countries. Google tells me that in any given year, 6-7% of Americans will travel to Europe, while 5% of Europeans travel to America.
America is a geographically large country, and our state-to-state travel is probably roughly equivalent to Europeans traveling country to county in Europe and the UK. Granted, there are norms within a single, large country, but there are also tremendous differences between regions in the US (yes, some of which don't have a/c because they don't really need it).
Good post, but it glosses over the obvious. It simply isn’t as continuously hot in the UK during summer as it is in almost every American city. Most Americans don’t understand this, and most Brits don’t seem to either, so they are talking past each other. The temperature here is scorching for a lot more than 10 days a year.
Good point.
Most of the Brits commenting here - and HP herself - seem to miss that the UK is not the only country in Europe, and that the issue is bigger / more salient on the continent than in Britain.
Try installing AC in your Paris apartment and you’ll find government makes it not so easy…
I read that between 20 and 25% of people in France have them
To me all these posts in X rather read as a targeted bot-based anti-Europe hit campaign. As you point out, why would American conservatives care about the health of elderly and vulnerable Europeans? These waves of anti-Europe posts come out on such a regular basis that I cannot see them as anything else than coordinated attacks. And after all, Musks algorithm pushes anything depicting Europe as this failing decrepit continent.
Anyhow, I completely agree with your arguments. Great article!
They don't. They are enjoying the time-honored tradition of feeling morally superior to people they perceive as feeling morally superior to them.
@Helen Pluckrose
Thank you for this cool-headed discussion of a topic that generates heated interactions...
I’m sitting here in my air-conditioned room in NYC, having my coffee and, as usual, thoroughly enjoying your calm, thoughtful writing.
I have discovered that hell is when Americans are desperate for a W and make it everyone else’s problem
From the Daily Mash -
"AN American on a trip of a lifetime to Europe is hoping it will be crime-ridden, poverty-stricken and without air conditioning.
Trump supporter Jordan Gardner of North Carolina cannot wait to find out if Europe is as poor, backwards, filthy and full of dumb, ugly liberals as his friends online tell him it is.
He said: “I land in Londonistan at 4pm, and I’m hoping to get my phone snatched by illegals on motor scooters by 4.45pm at the latest.
“I’ve made sure to book into a hotel without air conditioning, which the asshole limeys have never even heard of, and then I’ll go to a ‘pub’ where the beer will be warm and Millwall fans will ‘boot my nut in’ when I tell them their sport is gay. Looking forward to it!
“After that I go to France, where they don’t even speak goddamn English, and Germany where they’d be speaking German if it wasn’t for us. I’ll see the Eiffel Tower which isn’t as tall as Freedom Tower, the Mona Lisa which sucks, and I’ll knock down the Berlin Wall.
“During all of that I hope to be mugged, drugged and if possible sodomised by Islamic invaders who’ve taken over the continent and turned it into a cesspit. I’ve scheduled that as a livestream.
“Finally, I’ll turn down all socialist healthcare, drag my broken, bleeding, overheated body onto a flight home, arrive in the wonderful 64ºF US and attend the US Semiquincentennial grateful I was smart enough to be born American. I hope Trump rambles.”
I’m actually more confused by the lack of window screens than the lack of air conditioning. Even when you buy new PVC windows they don’t have screens. There are more bugs and dust in Cambridge than there are in San Francisco and yet in their latter every home has screens. My mother (in Somerset) conducts massive fly swatting campaigns a whenever it’s hot and they have the windows open. It seems you can’t even get screens as an option if you want them.
Mind you, both window screens and domestic AC became popular first in the US South as a public health measure against malaria. By the time either option became possible malaria was already gone from the UK. This might be relevant. But with longer and hotter hot spells, there’s a public health reason now.
It feels similar to most Americans not having electric kettles. We could attack America for its pathetic 120V mains electricity supply meaning kettles take longer to boil. Proper countries have 240V! Or we could just accept they have a different culture and have made different choices.
Kettles are cheaper than AC though. I might consider AC if I owned the house I live in, but I don’t. I might also invest in better insulation to keep the place warm in winter. There again, I might not. Mostly it’s neither extremely hot nor extremely cold in Britain. We have (or had) a temperate climate. Much of the US regularly experiences extreme heat and extreme cold.
Ha! I have made the kettle point too.
We don't drink enough tea to justify kettles for a tea ritual when a microwave will do just fine and makes the exact same water.
However, as an American, I won't defend our measly 120V outlets as the best out of all the informed possible options, or as the only ecologically responsible choice. The more energy, the better, generally, and I won't be found defending the technologically inferior option. Hell, I've adopted bidets in my house and will never go without one now.
Tut.
I don’t drink that much tea but I’d also use the kettle to boil water for coffee or for cooking pasta, rice, noodles or vegetables. That I suppose makes sense when boiling a kettle is quicker and easier than the alternatives.
I use an electric kettle for pre-heating water for cooking on the stovetop and also for getting hot water for the sink to wash dishes (don't have to waste cold water running down the drain waiting for the hot). I also use it to boil water in the wintertime to thaw out the cats' water bowl. So many uses for the electric kettle...
Oh, and I sometimes I even use it for making teal!
Great article.
Re. “It seems probable that people doing this are giving the culturally common European indifference towards air conditioning a much more loaded political or philosophical significance than it really has”
I think another part of this is that there’s a small cottage industry for online content saying ‘look how backwards American is compared to Europe’ (gun deaths/healthcare/canned chicken etc.) I can imagine that for a certain type of very online Americans who has been exposed to a lot of this content the opportunity to sling some mud back across the pond is incredibly appealing.
Yeah, it's obviously this.
Understandable and fair, in context. The context being social media shitposting, of course. It's when it starts coming in the guise of serious punditry... well, I'll refrain from psychoanalyzing (and oh, there's a lot I could say about the type of person who does it) but "stop being weird" nails the correct response.
Though I take the point about the Twitter/X users being jerks (something not unheard of for Americans and others, especially on that platform), I do think it should be noted that as far as I can tell nobody is proposing/already implemented any kind of AC mandate. I certainly don't condone shaming people in order to get them to use it - generally not a prosocial method in practice. On the other hand, many European countries DO appear to have anti-AC laws/regulations. Imagine a country where you had to apply for a government permit in order to NOT drink alcohol? Or be required to get a doctor's note in order to NOT smoke cigarettes? Or weren't legally permitted to use a seat belt when driving on a historic road? Such laws and regulations are definitely illiberal when applied to AC as well.
I once had dinner with a British diplomat in Borneo. There are insects everywhere in Borneo, though most are perfectly harmless. They poured through the open window in their multitudes, attracted to the lights. When I asked my host why he didn't install screens he replied that screens prevented airflow, a fact known to all those who live in England where there are no bugs. I explained that I live in rural Florida where human habitation would be impossible without screen and air conditioning.. He concluded that I was just another American ignoramus.
Yeah, that’s nuts.