Thermal shock · ↗ www.noahpinion.blog

Europe just experienced a heat wave that literally cooked thousands of people to death. This annual tragedy has once again reignited the debate over air conditioning, the use of which remains shockingly rare in Europe. It is also a good excuse to re-up Noah Smith’s excellent piece on Europe’s crusade against the life-enabling technology.

The European objection to AC seems to be more cultural than anything. Yes, energy is more expensive in Europe than in the US or Canada, but for most households it would not be devastatingly expensive to run AC during a heat wave. That is especially true in hospitals, nursing homes, and long-term care facilities, where many preventable heat-related deaths occur.

Europeans have adopted a variety of superstitions around AC, including the French fear of a dangerous, even life-threatening condition called “thermal shock”, supposedly caused by moving from the hot outdoors into an air-conditioned room. Of course, this AC-related malady exists nowhere where AC use is common.

The belief that AC is harmful seems to be reinforced by European ideas around climate change and degrowth: it is unfair, even selfish, to use energy to deal with the heat, since rising temperatures are a consequence of climate change. This frame has never made sense to me, as I have long been convinced of technological and economic solutions to climate change. There’s a reason Texas is the US state with the highest utility-scale solar energy production: because it works. It is not because Texas suddenly became woke on climate change. Energy is the currency of civilization, and we should aim to produce as much of it as possible, as cheaply and cleanly as possible.