No Air Conditioning? You Adapt . . .

We never had air conditioning when I was young and still had years before hitting 19 when I left home forever. Some how in their homes after I left had air conditioning. Abd I was down at Lejeune or in Cuba. Humidity versus a dry heat, Both were uncomfortable even with your sleeves rolled up. I do not remember rain in Cuba or much shade. I tanned quickly on my arms and neck in Cuba. The nine months there was probably the only time I was not drinking the tainted water at Lejeune.

That water at Lejeune is another story to be told. My platelets like to take vacations once and a while since 82. It is still a battle. Cuba was good duty and I was always bust day and night fixing the communications on the perimeter.

When I was working in Germany, etc. I do remember having air conditioning in the offices. Not so much where I stayed on the third floor overlooking the small town, Slept with the windows open. You get used to no air conditioning.

“The Overlooked Reason Europe Doesn’t Have AC.” The Atlantic

– by Thomas Chatterton Williams

Last weekend, I arrived in Paris at the beginning of the heat wave, or canicule, that has stifled the country and much of Europe. Temperatures in France have soared to record-breaking highs, reaching nearly 112 degrees Fahrenheit in certain parts of the country. Several young children have died in parked vehicles, and the French government reported earlier this week that dozens of people have drowned in waterways while seeking relief from the heat. Many more have been hospitalized. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 175,000 people die from heat-related causes each year across Europe. Although such tallies are imperfect, there is legitimate concern that this summer could be particularly lethal.

Some commentators in the United States have taken the opportunity to lecture Europeans, and perhaps even indulge in a little schadenfreude. “Just install the goddamn fucking AC and save your grandma’s life, Euro friends!” the popular economics writer Noah Smith posted on X. “I asked Claude about the air conditioning debate in Europe, and it really didn’t pull any punches,” Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, wrote in a viral post. The AI model told Collison that the “elaborate discourse” used to justify the scarcity of AC in Europe “is largely a way of processing the psychological discomfort of admitting that the American approach to summer was correct all along.” Elon Musk reposted the sentiment, calling it a “banger.”

Plenty of Americans seem scandalized that more Western Europeans don’t embrace the technological miracle of AC.But the disagreement ultimately has less to do with objective criteria—such as the effects of climate change in Europe, which is warming twice as fast as the global average—than subjective questions about what constitutes an acceptable level of physical suffering and sacrifice. As someone who splits his time between the United States and France, I’ve seen firsthand how Americans tend to interpret discomfort as a failure of infrastructure, whereas Europeans seem much more willing to regard it as part of life. These contrasting views have resulted in far too much air-conditioning on one side and not remotely enough on the other.

For many Parisians who are not physiologically vulnerable, the past week hasn’t been nearly as apocalyptic as media accounts have suggested. Parisians have rolled with the heat; it certainly hasn’t kept them from carrying on with their lives. Cafés and ice-cream parlors are packed. The roving outdoor Fêtede la Musiquelast Sunday drew half a million revelers. Throughout the heat wave, men’s fashion-week parties have spilled onto the streets. My son’s school, like many in France, asked parents to keep children home due to a lack of climate control. Yet everyone I know found a way to manage, and some took turns shepherding groups of kids to pools and museums.

Traditional French residences were designed to breathe in the summer months. Even if the architects of my building didn’t anticipate global warming, their handiwork, with some minor accommodations, has made the past week bearable. When I come indoors, I mist myself with water and drink more of it than usual. Like my neighbors, I keep my windows closed behind metal shutters to block out the midday sunlight and open them when there is a breeze in the evening. Otherwise, to keep the air from turning stagnant, I run two purifiers. I’m sure I would feel differently if I were underneath one of the heat-absorbing zinc roofs that are common in Paris, but living on the ground level, I haven’t even felt the need to buy a fan yet. The temperatures have no doubt been sweltering by French standards, but not any worse than the hottest days of my childhood summers in New Jersey or my college years in Washington, D.C.

I wouldn’t have noticed there was such a monumental problem had I not been plugged into X. Underneath the debate raging online is a fundamental divide about how America and Europe address discomfort. Americans have grown accustomed to treating temperature in particular and physical distress more broadly as challenges to be fixed rather than states to be endured. This is in keeping with our flattering self-conception as optimizers and pragmatists. The U.S. has spent decades engineering interior environments—offices, cars, shops, homes—in which refrigerator-like conditions are standard.

For many Europeans, though, the ubiquity and frigidity of air-conditioning in the U.S. play into the perception of Americans as profligate and pampered. The American big-box stores that prop their doorways open on hot days and blast polar air on passersby are a symbol of perverse excess in the eyes of Europeans, who pride themselves on small but telling displays of thrift: conserving water while washing dishes; wearing extra layers rather than turning up the heat in winter; scraping plates clean at dinner. These are people who still carry within them memories of war, occupation, and stretches of extreme privation. The idea that America is the land of abundance while Europe runs on a scarcity mindset is a cliché for a reason.

Neither side, strictly speaking, is responding to the weather. They seem instead to be drawing on highly different sets of values and norms around consumption, noise, pollution, and even the importance of public beauty, all of which help determine whether the physical sensation of warmth is even a problem in the first place. For example, Paris has an aesthetic aversion to window units and rooftop HVAC systems, which helps explain why installing air-conditioning typically requires special permission from authorities, especially in protected or historic areas. This is, after all, a town where hanging laundry to dry from your windows is illegal. Such regulations might seem draconian, but they help preserve the city’s distinctive appeal.

I find that my own thinking about the temperature depends on where I am. In the U.S., I don’t hesitate to switch on the AC. But when I’m in Paris, there is something satisfying, maybe even a little noble, about withstanding the heat without the help of climate control.

One of Nietzsche’s many great and provocative insights in On the Genealogy of Morals is that pain isn’t objective or proportional to external conditions, but rather a matter of perspective and therefore interpretation. This truth holds for individuals and also for societies. That’s why, on one side of the Atlantic, overcooled offices and subways necessitate wearing a fleece in August. On the other side, too many buildings feel like saunas.

A growing divide has also emerged within Europe. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party has opportunistically seized on air-conditioning, portraying it as an urgent quality-of-life issue that moralizing environmentalists and overreaching technocrats have ignored. As a result, the far right has polarized what should be a nuanced debate, in much the same way that some American conservatives turned masking into a form of political sorting.

A middle path is possible. For European leaders, it will mean adapting and installing more air-conditioning particularly in schools, public transportation, and hospitals, where the heat has wrought havoc. On Thursday, which surpassed Wednesday as France’s hottest day on record, a bus driver reportedly passed out from heatstroke and crashed into a tree on the western edge of Paris. Maternity wards are overheating, hundreds of thousands of poultry have perished, and cities across the country banned alcohol sales and public consumption in an effort to ease an overburdened health-care system. Americans may have become too intolerant of heat, but this is patently ridiculous.

When I got in a taxi at the start of the heat wave, the driver left the windows open. The breeze felt like a blow dryer. We drove like that for more than 10 minutes until we got onto the highway and he relented, switching on the AC. His preference to sweat it out, however well-meaning, had grown untenable.