As Europe sizzles during a heat wave that has killed hundreds due to lack of air conditioning, European politicians and pundits are blaming the United States for its widespread use of air conditioning, claiming the near-universal adoption of air conditioners in homes and buildings in the United States has contributed to climate change, resulting in more severe heat waves.
Air conditioning does have a climate impact, a positive one. It alone saves countless people, especially the elderly, where it is available.
The present heat wave in Europe is not unusual historically, nor are deaths from heat, but while the former is unavoidable, the latter, as residents of the United States and elites in Europe know, is very avoidable. Just install and plug in an air conditioner.
Europe’s persistent rejection and America’s prevalent use of air conditioning, not climate change, is the difference between the suffering many Europeans are experiencing during the present heat wave as compared to the relative comfort most Americans experience, even in hotspots like Texas and Florida, every summer. Air conditioning doesn’t cause climate change, but it certainly saves lives.
Europe’s elites, by and large, have air conditioning installed in their own homes. But they would rather use heat-related deaths as a talking point to further the “climate change causes everything bad” narrative than prevent such deaths by allowing all Europeans to use air conditioning if that might marginally increase global carbon dioxide emissions. European elites' hypocrisy on the matter of air conditioning, “air conditioning for we, but not for thee,” shares much in common with the Chinese Communist Party’s recent harangue about the use of air conditioning.
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Air conditioning contributes a negligible amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Thus, even if one thinks carbon dioxide is driving global warming, a marginal change will not profoundly impact the temperature. A recent study in Nature, for example, found that should hundreds of millions of poor people gain access to air conditioning, it could, under some climate model scenarios, add 0.003–0.05 °C of warming by 2050. Even if that estimate is accurate, that amount of warming over the next 24 years is so small no one is going to feel it, and no weather dynamics are going to be impacted by that minor variance. That modeled, virtually unmeasurable increase in future temperatures should be weighed against the tens of thousands of lives, which research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Internal Medicine and by the International Energy Agency (IEA) show could be saved by expanding access to air conditioning. During periodic heat waves in countries that normally experience high temperatures, the adoption of widespread air conditioning use is rapidly becoming the best way to save lives.
“Lack of access to indoor cooling puts much of the global population at high risk for heat stress, adversely affecting thermal comfort, labour productivity, and human health,” the IEA report notes. “[A]ccess to effective cooling has saved tens of thousands of lives . . . the average annual number of heat-related deaths averted by AC increase[d] 3-fold, reaching an estimated 190 000 lives saved per year during 2019-2021.”
The differences in health outcomes and worker productivity between Paris, London, and Berlin, and Houston, Las Vegas, and New Orleans during the summer are not instances of extreme heat or climate change; it is the availability of air conditioning. As meteorologist Anthony Watts recently noted, more than 90 percent of American homes have air conditioning. Hospitals, nursing homes, schools, offices, shopping centers, and private residences all provide refuge from dangerous heat. Europe chose a different, deadly path. Only about 20 percent of homes across Europe have air conditioning, and in the United Kingdom the figure is less than 5 percent.
Despite clear lifesaving and enhancing benefits of air conditioning, governments in Europe continue to actively suppress air conditioner use, resulting in more discomfort, suffering, sickness, and even death.
With this truth in evidence, it is unconscionable that Europe’s leaders actively prevent wider adoption and use of air conditioning!
One hurdle to Europe expanding air conditioning use is its outdated electric power infrastructure. Europe’s power grid cannot provide the additional demand for electricity needed for widespread air conditioning adoption. Europe's grid depends too much on intermittent, unreliable wind and solar power. This points to the need for expanded and improved reliable electric power infrastructure and generating sources. To expand Europe’s electric power supply, it needs to end the climate policies that have forced the closure of baseload power plants fueled by fossil fuels like coal. These reliable power sources, unlike wind or solar, can keep air conditioners running, night and day, wind or no wind.
If Europe’s leaders keep their heads in the sand on this matter, continuing to deflect blame on climate change rather than their own climate and energy policies, changes in government might be necessary to solve the problem. Greater mainstream and social media attention to this matter is warranted. Indeed, it is literally a matter of life and death for numerous people.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., ([email protected]) is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization based in Illinois.
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