The Air Conditioning Wars Are Heating Up

Urge to make dad jokes increasing

Photo by Kévin JINER on Unsplash

Air conditioning. The eighth wonder of the world. Yet, according to finger-wagging environmentalists, a scourge on our planet. There are a multitude of articles decrying the evils of air conditioning. How by cooling our own homes, we are simply heating the rest of the planet. The problems with air conditioning are well known. It does take a tremendous amount of electricity to keep all of our indoor spaces cool. The United States uses more electricity for air conditioning than the continent of Africa uses for everything. That’s over a billion people across an entire continent, all their factories and businesses and homes and cellphones, using less electricity than 340 million Americans do to cool their indoor spaces. Most of our electricity comes from fossil fuels, so all that electricity makes up a nontrivial percentage of US usage. This contrasts with the war on plastic straws, which on net does nothing measurable for the environment and only makes it harder for me to enjoy my mango papaya strawberry dragon fruit smoothie.  Air conditioners also have the perverse side effect of heating the outdoors while cooling the indoors. Some cities may be up to four degrees warmer on a hot night solely because people run their air conditioners. So those against air conditioning do have a point.

Air conditioning has also made us soft. Let alone third-world nations in the tropics, Americans struggle to exist anywhere that doesn’t have a properly controlled temperature. My wife was shocked to discover that many European homes and even hotels don’t have air conditioning, even though the temperature is hot throughout the summer. I remember traveling on buses throughout Nicaragua a decade ago, sitting in an increasingly large puddle of my own sweat while everyone else chitchatted as if it wasn’t roughly the temperature one would expect in a 1990s school bus with the windows up going through the jungle, which it was. Upon asking an Italian Airbnb host who charged extra for the air conditioning if it would get cool enough at night to not need it, she replied, “For Italians, yes. For everyone else, yes. But for Americans, I do not say. They always complain!” We are soft.

But there is a touch of self-righteousness to all the “turn off your air conditioner!” sermonizing. While it is true that most Americans keep their homes cooler than they need to, and that movie theater owners must be paid off by sweater makers to keep their theaters roughly the temperature of an Aleutian igloo, air conditioning is only one way we keep the indoors comfortable. While cooling the temperature by 20 degrees in the summer may not always be necessary, nor is it necessary to heat a space to 70 degrees in the winter. Life would continue if heating units were restricted to keeping the temperature no warmer than 55 degrees. Any argument against air conditioning would still apply. Yet people from temperate climates who are happy to criticize their southern neighbors seem to have no problem with cranking their heaters all winter and living in places with winter temps that rarely climb above freezing. If cooling the air to 70 degrees in the summer is a waste of resources, so is heating it.

For Americans, aircon is as much a part of life as apple pie. We cool every space inhabited by humans, from shopping malls to train stations to the trains themselves. We have bent the climate to our will, making jungles and deserts and swamps pleasantly inhabitable on even the hottest days. This has remade the country. Today, millions of Americans move south every year, leading to booms in former backwaters. The entire state of Florida has been remade because of aircon. 100 years ago the state consisted of a few small towns and vacation areas that wealthy East Coasters traveled to during the winter. 150 years ago the biggest city in Florida was Key West, population 9,890. Located on an island, Key West’s trade winds make it one of the few places in the state that can be comfortably inhabited year-round without electricity. Without air conditioning Miami would have likely stayed the small city it was 100 years ago, with fewer than 30,000 people.

Admittedly, it may not be the best thing that air conditioning has allowed humanity to build massive cities in formerly inhabitable areas. The sheer amount of electricity Disney World must use to run its air conditioners would be enough to power a small country. Terraforming swamps and wetlands into massive cities have undoubtedly caused irreversible damage to much of the Sunshine State. Yet, to describe air conditioning as a mere luxury technology is also incorrect. People may often talk about how their ancestors lived without air conditioning, as do most of the world’s poor, so we should be able to live without it as well. But that is incorrect. AC, far from being a mere luxury, is a necessity. Not a necessity like clean drinking water or shelter, but certainly as important as over-the-counter drugs. The fact is the economic health of the United States, and the physical health of millions of Americans, rely on air conditioning.

Lack of air conditioning kills. Even in temperate climates like Europe, the lack of air conditioning can be and is fatal. Over 60,000 Europeans died in 2022 from heat-related illnesses, more than the amount killed by guns in the United States. While it is obvious that hospitals and nurseries should be kept cool, the health benefits go far beyond protecting the vulnerable. Anybody suffering from illness or injury will have a quicker recovery if they are in a temperature-controlled space. People with asthma, allergies, or other conditions that affect the respiratory system will be equally disadvantaged if they are forced to convalesce in the heat. The human body can certainly exist in hot temperatures, but to say that air conditioning only provides comfort is wrong.

Beyond physical health, the health of the economy also largely depends on keeping spaces effective for workers. If the United States were to ban air conditioning effective tomorrow, it would cause a recession that would ripple around the entire planet. It would make the 2008 financial crisis look like a mere inconvenience. The American economy in hot parts of the country would collapse. Not just because Americans are used to the convenience of aircon, but because Americans are some of the most productive workers in the world. Despite constant handwringing about how people don’t want to work anymore and a declining work ethic, the United States still churns out more high-value goods and services per hour worked than anywhere else. There are many reasons for this, key among them the high amounts of human and physical capital the country has.

But part of it is because the vast majority of Americans who work indoors do so in a comfortable climate. Living and working in the heat is exhausting. It saps the strength, reduces cognitive function, and craters ambition. I spent several months living in Cambodia in an unconditioned apartment. During the humid season the overnight low would sometimes stay above 90 degrees. It was oppressive. I found myself listless, rarely doing anything I didn’t have to and spending hours on end laying on the floor staring at the ceiling. I was constantly irritated at the smallest things. Having a fan blow on me at night certainly helped, but it was no substitute for air conditioning. Until the rainy season arrived in May, providing blissfully cool temperatures (sometimes it would drop to the mid-70s!) it was rough. There’s a reason that Singapore’s founding prime minister credited air conditioning with the small country into the global success story it is today.

Air conditioning is a fact of life. While countries like Switzerland have made it illegal to install new residential units without a medical reason, most of the world is going to only increase their demand. It certainly isn’t going out of style in the United States. Instead of a futile attempt at getting people to abandon AC, efforts should be put toward transitioning the grid to low-carbon energy sources and educating people on their usage. By converting away from coal and oil, and toward renewables and nuclear, the environmental costs of air conditioning will be mitigated. By teaching people that running an air conditioner in an empty building and not having proper insulation is just throwing money away, people will become more efficient. Air conditioning is a great invention. Let’s be efficient about it.