Audio By Carbonatix

Europe’s perennial climate panic has led to countless acts of economic and geopolitical self-harm, but for outright stupidity and life-threatening recklessness, the efforts by its governments to discourage air-conditioning are hard to beat.

AC, a product of American ingenuity, has been spreading across this country since the middle years of the past century. The boost that it has given, especially in hotter, more humid states, to livability, safety, and productivity has been a triumph. About 90 percent of U.S. households now have some form of AC, a level roughly comparable to Japan’s, although we lag South Korea. It’s a sign of the times that China is now home to more AC equipment than anywhere else and that demand for these marvelous devices is surging in India, too, albeit from a low base.

In Europe, however, AC is harder to find, with a penetration rate of somewhere between 20 and 30 percent, a number that masks higher rates in some of its more southerly countries. This lower take-up owes a great deal to the temperate climate that had prevailed in much of it, and quite a bit to the buildings that survive from that era. Old, grand architecture and AC are not always an easy fit. A certain snobbish/jealous disdain for the comforts of American life has also played its part. And so have electricity prices that are significantly higher than on this side of the Atlantic.

This expensive electricity is, in no small part, a consequence of the devotion of the European ruling class (and, regrettably, of quite a few of their subjects) to the “race” to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a race as reckless as it is futile. Participating in it has meant that European governments have made it unnecessarily difficult to install AC. Their explanation is that generating additional electricity for extra AC will mean more greenhouse gas emissions.

That said, a glance at France casts some doubt on that excuse. French authorities have been among the noisiest in their opposition to easier access to air-conditioning, yet roughly 70 percent of France’s electricity comes from “clean” nuclear power. There are also genuine fears that succumbing to the extra demand for AC would strain Europe’s struggling electricity grids, although such worries have not stood in the way of the campaign to bully or bribe Europeans into electric vehicles. Needless to say, a key cause of the pressure on European grids has been the billions devoted to “renewables” at the expense of the continent’s electric grid and more efficient power generation. Malinvestment is what it is.

That the aversion to AC should be so strong on a continent that prides itself (not always accurately) on its sense of history ought to embarrass Europeans more than it does. Humanity’s advance — there are now more than 8 billion of us spread across the globe, flourishing as never before — is a living monument to our ingenuity and to our adaptability. It is reasonable to expect that those same qualities will enable us to cope with a warming planet without abandoning the economic growth that has taken our species so far.

But climate panic is hostile to such thinking. Mitigating man-made climate change was always going to take time and, in all probability, technologies that either do not yet exist or are not yet ready for prime time. In the interim, we will, as in the past, have to adapt — in this case to higher temperatures, among other changes. The good news is that air-conditioning is available to play a critical role in the adaptation. If Europe’s people want to use more of it (many seem to), their governments should get out of the way. To argue otherwise makes almost as much sense as telling people who are waiting for a bus in the rain not to unfurl their umbrellas because a bus shelter will be built in due course.

Except this is a life-and-death issue, especially given Europe’s aging population.

Numbers are, as in so many areas where climate is concerned, disputed, but roughly 2,000 Americans a year die of heat-related causes, compared with an estimated 24,400 deaths in Europe’s urbanized areas in 2025 (there are other, significantly higher estimates of the toll in Europe). Much of that discrepancy can be attributed to inadequate AC. It is a striking reminder that climate policies can be more deadly than climate change.