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I always struggle to take these sort of posts from people who don't live in "Europe" seriously. Europe is not a unit like the USA is, it's very diverse, and you generally can't neatly extrapolate your observations from one country to all others.
It hasn't ever been this hot, this regularly, especially in the northen parts of the continent. Add that to the number of historical building, streets, etc, that really can't (or shouldn't) get littered with eyesores on every balcony, and you can understand why AC units never picked up much steam in a lot of places. But that doesn't mean people have some twisted aversion to the technology, in fact, it already exists in many places. Where I'm from (a southern country), it's more common for a public place (buildings, transport, and so on) to have AC than to not have it. On people's homes, it's less common, but there's been a natural increase in demand. Unfortunately, many can't justify the investment to retrofit it into existing buildings, though new ones are likely to be built with central HVAC systems.
I don't know, it feels weird to read pieces like this one. It seems clear the author does not live over here and has a skewed conception of what Europe is and the peculiarities of each country and region. His previous post on the topic even goes as far as calling out some form of resistant to "foreign technology"...
It's easy to make blanket assumptions, but a bit of empathy and a more careful approach into these issues would go a long way.
Europeans (and oftentimes Americans themselves) tend to underestimate American diversity.
Even on this AC issue where I would admit that there is less national variance compared to the EU. Yet still, about 90% of the US has AC but there are places like San Francisco where only 50% of buildings have AC. In Berkeley California only 20% of buildings have AC.
Again, on this AC issue I admit has less variance than Europe has, but that builds my point if anything. On other issues Americans can have much more variance than your premise implies. Have you considered the life of an Utah Mormon (who may use food rations in lieu of kitchen furniture) is drastically different than a kid growing up in the Bronx (who may have grew up playing on public outdoor courts and have radical independence since middle school because of the MTA)? Have you compared a rural Appalachian’s lifestyle and culture to that of a SF big tech worker? North New Jersey full of suburban white-collar workers who would have trouble understanding southern New Jersey full of farms who have annual festivities where they compare tractors and catch greased-pigs. I find that even “coastal elites” from SF and NYC — people groups who should be most ideologically/socially aligned due to their shared economic statuses, ability to travel, and many points of cross contamination/communication — don’t fully understand eachother’s drastic ideological and lifestyle philosophical differences very well. Moreover, within just one borough of one city there can be drastic diversity in between its townships: NYC Queens having much more diverse townships than any particular borough in Europe.
Europeans who rely of the premise that America is not diverse I find to be just as dumb as the average American.
You're right, the USA is huge and highly diverse as well. Yet, I'd still say it's more of a unit than the EU is, in many ways, and especially more so than "Europe". That's what I meant with "Europe is not a unit like the USA is"; not that the USA has absolute unity and Europe has none. But I may be wrong about the USA's cohesion on a deeper level, I've never been there and only see it through an outsider's lens.
Solar panels + cooling + heating heat pump is the most logical combination as we are past the point of no return on global warming.
And there's no need to be like the Americans that cool down to 18°C when the outside is > 35°C: simply decreasing the indoor temperature to saner numbers like 26°C is enough, it's summer after all. Less energy usage and it is enough for the body to be happy.
Americans aren't cooling their homes to 64F in the summer, I have no idea where you get that idea. Generally people will cool their homes to somewhere around 72-78F, which is 22.22-25.56C.
I do at night, just for the bedroom. Need it to sleep well. I Keep it around 75-78 in the house in the daytime, on hot days, and just dress for it, no problem then.
I've lived in a house with no AC and even slept outside on a hammock on the hottest days (luckily that was a house built in the 19-teens so it could cope with AC-less heat better than modern houses, but still, on nights when your nighttime lows were still in the high 70s and the air wasn't moving, outdoors was cooler than indoors) and I didn't acclimate, I just only got like 3 hours of sleep a night when it was hot, every single time it was hot.
Need the cold for sleep. I'd have to move farther north for my own sanity if not for AC (and I'm already far enough north I only need AC to achieve low-60s nighttime temps for 60-70 nights per year). I could lay off it a little if work didn't still expect me to function when it's hot, but they do.
In my experience very few Americans set their A/C to anything above 75F.
+ it lowers humidity and moves air.
> Solar panels + cooling + heating heat pump is the most logical combination as we are past the point of no return on global warming.
I’ve been feeling confused lately about the news that the far-right parties in UK & France want more AC and the left-wing complain it’s not solving the root problems.
Are people just not aware that heat pumps are a great solution for both heating and cooling, saving energy on heating during winter?
> Are people just not aware that heat pumps are a great solution
In my European country, people struggle to buy houses, nobody is rushing to do a full house renovation.
Furthermore, the consensus is: heat pumps are great for a new home or a full renovation. Installing a heat pump with old-style radiators makes no sense, because the heat pump heats to a low temperature.
Tech to combine radiator based heat pump heating with cooling is relatively new to the market.
I would have assumed air-con was standard in new built homes in southern Europe and less so once you get to more northern places where the load is mostly heating.
Then there are refits, which add another dimension of cost and difficulty.
Far right parties want more fossil fuels burning for cooling and heating (more coal, more gas, more oil, more water pollution).
And I think that parties saying burning more fossil fuels doesn't fix the problem, like, at all, aren't particularly wrong? And they're also the ones trying to push for more solar/wind energy generation and more heat pumps (that can heat in the winter and cool in the summer).
Not sure what you're trying to convey or where you're taking your data from?
The leftists are free to sweat or freeze to the point of exhaustion then. Modern AC units with heat pumps are just great. I'm going to install one myself soon.
I have seen more criticism of resistance against AC than people actually arguing against AC.
Maybe there is a group of loud AC resistors somewhere that I managed to avoid this whole time? Or maybe the pundits are pushing a narrative to rile people up and drive their substack income like they always do? Who knows!
This other article mentioned that France’s left party was anti-AC but are now starting to change their policy positions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48661506
From this limited sample, I’d imagine there was a groups of advocates arguing for anti-AC policies, but that this is now shifting with as climate change develops.
Questionable (albeit maybe defensible) degrowth policies are not unheard of in the EU. Most famously is Germany’s move away from nuclear which forced their dependence on Russian natural gas. So there is probably truth that people used to be somewhat anti-AC. But, I’d share your skepticism if there are large groups of people who still believe in anti-AC policies. The article I share would suggest many of these people have updated their priors.
I don't understand this article.
Europe is usually not this hot, hence lack of AC in many places. Floods and earthquakes are also uncommon, hence the buildings in most places are not up to code against, say, Japanese standards.
> Europe is usually not this hot, hence lack of AC in many places.
Europe averages 53k to 175k heat-related deaths per year. The difference depends on whether you listen to the EC or the UN. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152766
The comparable number for the US is 4-11k, albeit with about 20% fewer people.
Note that the US is further south than Europe and generally has higher temperatures.
#1 recommendation from the same link:
Keeping out of the heat: Avoid going out and undertaking strenuous activities when the sun’s at its hottest. Stay in the shade and do not leave children or animals in parked vehicles. If necessary and possible, spend two to three hours in a cool place, such as a supermarket or cinema
That's because the US and Europe count heat-related deaths differently. In the US they count deaths caused by heat. In Europe they count deaths worsened by heat.
Salient point (for me) from TFA regarding the number of heat-related deaths in Europe:
> So the death rate from heat in Europe is almost twice the death rate from guns in America. If you think guns are an emergency in the U.S., you should think that heat in Europe is an even bigger emergency.
The primary difference being, Europe is not increasing their number of fault lines or bodies of water. The number of days of moderate to extreme heat in Europe have already significantly increased and will continue to.
Furthermore, the costs of modern cooling are infinitely cheaper than solutions, if they exist, for other natural disasters.
I lived in both Europe and the United States and traveled around the world. This article makes a lot of sense to me.
An American decided to be smug because Europe suddenly passed the threshold where aircon went from a nice to have to a necessity.
It's interesting that you found the author smug, rather than informative or maybe prosecutorial toward the European elites who ostensibly want to sacrifice the masses at the altar of degrowth.
Also many old houses & modern insulated buildings have a significant heat inertia - so if the heat wave is not too long & you do sane heat management (open windows during the night to cool down the flat/house, keep windows closed during the day) then you will hardly notice the heat in an European home.
AC is far more efficient than most heating methods, but there isn't the same level of censure applied to traditional heating technologies. If you listen, people talk about AC like it's inherently polluting, like it's something to moralize.
Europe historically has not been this hot, but they regularly have heat waves. I remember a 40C heat wave more than a decade ago! That's enough time to add emergency infrastructure, unless you're hoping to snuff old people. When you get your third hundred year flood in a decade it's time to update your priors.
How many old people need to die in heatwaves before you accept that the climate is changing?
ACs are uncommon, yet red tape is plentiful.
Central-western Europe will have to massively install ACs, sooner or later, either only for cooling or both. They will not resist the summer heat in the coming years. Good for the AC companies.
The most difficult step is to accept the ugliness of the external unit to their beautiful buildings. Imagine Paris with a gray box hanged out of each 35m2 apartment.
Can they paint the ugly grey box to be a different color?
Worse. The black lines of the unit will look like dirt. Any solution will be a cultural devastation.
Installing AC feels like admitting defeat. 30 years ago we thought we could stop this thing. Our world leaders came together, listened to scientists and agreed targets.
Sadly we failed. Now I’m going to have to buy AC and make an even bigger contribution to global warming.
It may cause a heat island effect locally, but as long as the EU keeps fighting for abundant clean energy, everyone can have AC guilt-free.
I am curious about the power grid situation in Europe. Assume the rate of AC usage was as high as the US (or god forbid Japan), how far behind is the grid infrastructure from where it needs to be?
ERCOT (Texas) has daily swings of up to 50 gigawatts of power in the summer. I am pretty sure it is the most volatile US grid in terms of the demand side. A lot of the transmission infrastructure is purpose built for this exact problem.
There are massive distributed solar deployments (eg. people putting cheap solar panels on their roofs, often backed by batteries) happening right now, those should help offset AC demands quite nicely.
They don't have any problem with impact from EVs on the grid, but god forbid AC units. One could obviously solve the peoblem with rooftop solar, which peaks just when you need AC the most.
I can relate to a certain type of reluctance, in that I live in a part of the US that has never needed air conditioning. I don't look forward to the hassle and expense of installing a heat pump. I don't look forward to the cost of running one. And I won't like resigning to the fact that the summers I've experienced my whole life, as did my ancestors, are over forever.
Of course when it's regularly in the upper 80sF / 30C I will give in. I just empathize.
I can’t hear this degrowth strawman anymore. There are probably 20 people complaining about people wanting degrowth for everyone who actually advocates for that. It’s not like every politician in Europe is advocating for that.
Degrowth is absolutely not niche in Western Europe. In Germany and NL, it is the new religion along with free Palestine movement.
Take any moderately educated Zillenial and ask them what they feel passionately about.
People are feeling more and more alienated from large scale projects of humanity. They have also given up on religion itself. What remains is a facade of religion where degrowth and Palestine take act as Pseudo Religion.
Here in Germany I see stickers and Graffiti all the time.
“Fuck the big Tech”
“Fuck big oil”
“ChatGPT bad”
These are the kind of flyers I see. Of course I’m leaving out the Palestine stuff here.
There are close to Zero educated people excited about the idea of growth. Ask them and they would tell you they’d rather have all capitalists done away with return to a past when we were all peaceful and not “destroying the planet”.
Obviously I’m not claiming degrowth is majority. I’m claiming that at least within my bubble, zero people are excited about the potential of growth. And non trivial number of people want to kill growth.
As a Dutchman, I was so surprised by the contents of this comment that I finally decided to make an account.
Bringing up Palestine in this discussion is definitely a choice. Relating them as you have is special.
The amount of public figures advocating degrowth is low and declining. And I follow a lot of climate voices.
I'm old enough to remember the 1980's when people largely adopted a strikingly similar "new religion" that advocated for a free South Africa.
The Free Tibet "religion" was also a huge thing for a while in the 90's.
There are countless other examples. All with varying degrees of success.
The point is, there's nothing new about people being passionate about human rights. It has absolutely nothing to do with... well... whatever "degrowth" is.
> sunlight causes most of the heat issues; cloudy days are unlikely to be extremely hot
> solar panels convert sunlight to electricity
> AC converts electricity to cooler air indoors
Ah, if only there was a way to solve those three problems at once. Alas...
As to the "resistance" to AC: is this an actual thing or just something the media made up? It seems that for the most part anyone who wants AC can just buy it, barring exceptions like historical buildings. If people want to cook themselves alive I’m not really seeing the issue, as they only harm themselves (unlike, say, with vaccines where herd immunity is important).
It's just a meme but too-online professional opinion-havers memed themselves into taking it seriously. Many such cases unfortunately
As usual with culture war topics: Those examples in that article are often selective quoting and abridging information and a multi-step game of telephone and the language barrier hinders monolinguistic people from crosschecking.
Let's try one example, going back to sources:
1) Noah Smith writes "Meanwhile, some people at Germany’s Federal Environmental Ministry claimed (falsely) that portable air conditioners don’t work.", linking on a tweet by Andrew Hammel.
https://x.com/AndrewHammel1/status/2070436290915426555
(Hammel, in my opinion, has radicalised since 2015, producing culture war content about Germany for rightwing english-speaking audiences. I remember his old weblog from the 2000s, when he was a mild-mannered expat.)
2) Hammel's tweet shows a screenshot of an infographic which the news magazine ZDFHeute posted on Instagram. We can see those infographics in context, they are basically practical tips. There is the shortened sentence that the Federal Agency for the Enviroment, the Umweltbundesamt, advises against "portable ACs". That is true. But Hammel, I think, goes nuts.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ6xUPUlpYv/?img_index=2
3) Let's crosscheck with what the Umweltbundesamt actually wrote. We can find that on their homepage:
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/umwelttipps-fuer-den-alltag/g...
First practical advice how to behave in a heat wave.
Then practical advice for buildings and new construction, awning, isolation, heat pumps, etc.
Thirdly advice for AC, when necessary: energy efficient (it's the Umweltbundesamt after all), no polluting refrigerants, a preference for split AC units, where the radiator is on the outside instead of the inside. They contrast split AC against "portable units" also knows as monoblocks which are by definition not split but where the radiator is on the same unit and the radiator's hot air either goes directly into the room oder has to be transported outside through an open window. Hence the advice against monoblocks.
Additional complication nobody mentions: Practical all windows in Germany are of the tilt and turn type, which makes them not as practical for window AC units, because then the whole window is open. Take a look at the "portable" AC units sold by a national electronics chain:
https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/category/klimaanlagen-100.html
Almost all are inefficient monoblocks, no window units, only one portable split AC the Midea PortaSplit - which is sold out. And rather costly with 850 €.
But the PortaSplit is the best practical option for a lot of Germans, because it's a nation of renters.
In summary:
1) The Umweltbundesamt published practical advice including a preference for split AC units against monoblocks. I find that reasonable.
2) The news magazine ZDFHeute published a very abridged infographic quoting that advice. Could be better.
3) Hammel screenshots that infographic, doesn't crosscheck und rants in his tweet more about a strawman than what the UBA actually wrote.
4) Noah Smith simply believes what he sees on social media, I presume, because it fits his preconceived notions.
5) People on Hacker News ... well. Let's say most of them are not good on nuance on Europe.
...
What makes these discussions so annoying is that there is always a kernel of truth. But to put these kernels into context is work. I'm typing here for over half an hour already, just for randos on the net.
Something I'd like these culture warriors to look on concept like path dependency and cost-benefit. The reason a lot of northern Europe doesn't have AC, is a mixture of multiple things: heatwaves were extremely rare, the famous 2003 was described as a huge outlier. Hence there was a long time not a big market for ACs, hence the inventory and possibilities are spare.
Then a lot of old construction that can not easily modified. I live in a small apartment in a block built in 1904, now under historical preservation. Installing fixed AC would need major investment by the landlord and is often not practical. I think there is only a small wall usable for a per-apartment split AC. A whole-house of whole block unit or even better heat pumps would need major investment for 100s of small apartments here.
And for me, buying a PortaSplit when they are available. I'd like to. But 850 € is far out of my budget (I'm rather poor). And then there is the cost-benefit-analysis: There were only two days this year where the temperature inside was annoying for me. Those old building has 1m thick brick walls which isolate pretty well for the days of a heat wave. We had a few days with 37° C and more. The temperature in my apartment was the most time around 26° C, very slowly heating up. And now it's cooler for the next weeks. I was looking for a meteorological climate diagram for my city and the average temperature for June/July is around 24°. For let's say maybe five nights a year, I won't touch the emergency fund. If I lived differently, maybe under the roof, my calculation were different.
Those are all practical, economical decisions. But Noah Smith invents a whole ideological strawman. If we all were rich, we were living in passive houses or plus energy houses with air-to-air heat pumps. We aren't. It's always money. It's very seldom ideology.
I can live without AC, because i'd only 'need' it, for a couple of weeks in the year... and i doubt it'll be worth it tbh