Most of northwest Europe is critically unprepared for a world in which heatwaves are the norm, not an exception
In 1999, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew was asked what he thought the most influential innovation of the past millennium had been. His answer? Air-conditioning. It had transformed the lives of people in his equatorial city-state as well as all others in hot climates, he argued. It made modern civilization possible.
Britain is not a tropical island, but it felt like one this week. This was the hottest June on record, and summer has months to go. There will be more weeks like this in the next few months; and there will be more months like this in the coming years. Parts of our homes and many of our workplaces are essentially unlivable for longer and longer parts of the year.
As a nation, we cannot keep sleeping on the downstairs couch for the rest of our lives. Climate change is real, and Britain, like the rest of Europe, will have to adapt. It must start by changing its absurdly restrictive approach to air-con.
Most of northwest Europe is critically unprepared for a world in which heatwaves are the norm, not an exception. It has known that heat kills since the awful summer of 2003, when at least 30,000 people died from it across the continent. But the European Union has chosen not to adapt, even though the data shows this is a public-health emergency. As one viral chart points out, the EU’s heat-related excess deaths are comparable in number to US gun deaths.
In the UK’s response, meanwhile, we see a familiar mix of overregulation and moral posturing. Many of us have spent the past few days trying to put up portable ACs and fiddling with window seals — because the rules mean that installing regular window or split units is practically outlawed.
That’s true even of new houses. Part O of England’s Building Regulations — on the books since 2022 — solemnly demands those installing “mechanical cooling” in a new-build first demonstrate to zealous officials that all “practicable passive means” of cooling have been tried. You have to prove a negative to get a chance to cope with summer. This is why people dislike regulators.
Things are worse in older housing stock, which is insulated with winters in mind. So once the heat gets in during a hot snap in Summer, it can’t get out again without mechanical help. Anyone living in one of these abodes will tell you that. More than half of British homes are already at risk of overheating, according to official estimates.
If you want to install an AC unit in a house you own, you must first deal with curbs on how loud it can be — putting you at the mercy of your neighbors, who can call in environmental-health officials with sound meters to check whether you’re adding noticeably to background noise. Then your outdoor compressor has to be smaller than some arbitrarily chosen size limit. Each time you want to cool another room, you must jump through all these regulatory hoops again.
This isn’t quite an outright ban, as some complain. But the bar has been set deliberately and unreasonably high. A simple air-conditioning unit is treated the way a Victorian magistrate might have viewed a gin house: Permissible in theory, punishable in practice.
It is true that it guzzles power from the electricity grid, which in Britain is generated partly through fossil fuels and thus adds to your carbon footprint. But it has been singled out for opprobrium far more than other forms of polluting consumption, even though it can save lives.
A back-of-the-envelope estimate: Even a wasteful portable AC unit running for eight hours generates as much carbon dioxide equivalent as, say, commuting by car to a workplace a few miles away, or eating a couple of thick slices of roast beef. Nobody looks down on Sunday lunch.
To cool our houses, we are told to recover some sort of ancient wisdom if we are to avoid wickedness. The Financial Times suggests that we learn passive-cooling techniques from countries that have lived with heat for centuries.
I grew up in one of those places, as did Lee Kuan Yew, and we would both tell you that air-con is an unalloyed good. Don’t wander the world trying to find places with canopies, louvred ventilation outlets and thick earthen walls. Instead, try listening to the people who inherited that legacy, all of whom want split ACs.
There’s a joylessness to how the UK deals with crises like global heating, as if the remedy must make our lives worse or it isn’t useful. This is counter-productive. People should not be expected to suffer more than necessary to adapt, or they will revolt. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Lara Williams has written, Britain’s grid is being upgraded and cleaned up, meaning energy concerns become less urgent — particularly if we use solar power to take advantage when the sun shines and AC demand is high.
If we’re to spend much of our summers in quasi-tropical conditions, we must accept the solutions those parts of the world have chosen. Air-conditioning is the greatest of them.
