British heatwaves transform cities in ways that feel almost deliberate. Asphalt softens into something resembling liquid. The air takes on the quality of an open furnace. Residents resort to filling wheelie bins with cold water for makeshift plunges. Official advice reduces to drinking water, seeking shade, and staying indoors. One scientist even proposed coating windows with yoghurt as a reflective layer, arguing it spreads easily, dries fast, and washes off with a cloth.
These improvised defences feel anachronistic when much of the world has relied for decades on a straightforward technology: air conditioning. Yet in Europe, that simple mechanism has become the focal point of a surprisingly fierce cultural conflict.
The gender wars and the rise of climate colonialism
The dispute entered mainstream British discourse in 2015, when a writer for the Telegraph argued that office air conditioning was sexist. The claim: temperatures were set for men in shirtsleeves, leaving women huddled under shared jumpers. That debate never fully resolved, but it has since been overtaken by a broader ideological offensive. Critics now frame air conditioning as an instrument of "climate colonialism", suggesting that Western comfort standards and the energy-intensive buildings required to sustain them marginalise non-Western architectural traditions that might produce lower emissions. The proposed alternative: courtyards, natural ventilation, and organic materials in place of glass-and-steel towers.
This line of reasoning sometimes drifts into romanticism. During the 40°C heatwave of 2022, a Guardian contributor asked how Europe might learn from indigenous technologies that incorporate collective resource management and collaboration with natural systems, citing the irrigation terraces of Balinese rice paddies. The image of water cascading down London residential blocks to feed hanging gardens has a certain prelapsarian charm. Re-engineering the West's housing stock into irrigated terraces, however, would demand decades and gigatons of carbon emissions.
France's political divide
A more practical manifestation of anti-AC thinking is simply to reject the technology altogether. The stance is striking given that air conditioning now operates on a vast scale outside the West. Even Chinese pig farms, not generally noted for animal welfare, sometimes provide cooler air than European commuters experience. Yet the view on the European left is that most Europeans should endure heatwaves without mechanical cooling, that record-breaking summers should simply be endured.
In France, the divide is explicit. The right-wing National Rally campaigns for nationwide installation. The left is scandalised. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, declared in June: "We must absolutely not install air conditioning everywhere. That would only make things worse." The left maintains this position while largely ignoring the soaring adoption of air conditioning across the Global South. Europe's ageing population, conscripted into a continental display of self-denial, bears the consequences.
"We must absolutely not install air conditioning everywhere. That would only make things worse."
Britain's regulatory barrier
A softer but effective version of this resistance has made air conditioning practically impossible to install in British new-builds. To qualify, a building must first satisfy the demanding requirements of the "cooling hierarchy". Is the design energy-efficient? Are the windows high-specification glazing? Are there green roofs? Are ceilings high? Are solar panels combined with vegetation? Fail any criterion and the council will order the removal of the units and instruct the occupant to open windows instead.
With air conditioning now coded as a right-wing technology, Americans mock overheated Europeans and joke about turning their own systems down until they wake up cold. The war over cooling mirrors the faults of its antagonists: a know-nothing right revels in selfish consumption, while an anti-Western left finds ever more inventive outlets for performative asceticism.
Why heat pumps are not the answer
Heat pumps, favoured by the British establishment, do not resolve the problem. In winter, Britons expect warmth to arrive through plumbing rather than vents. Consequently, the heat pumps installed in the UK are integrated into wet heating systems, rendering them incapable of providing cooling in summer.
The only functional answer is air conditioning itself. Fortunately, the environmental harms associated with it are diminishing rapidly. Early units used refrigerants that were potent greenhouse gases. Newer models employ less damaging alternatives and are less prone to leakage. As for electricity consumption, there is no reason the power must come from fossil fuels. By definition, air conditioning is needed when the sun is at its strongest, which is precisely when solar generation peaks. Without fossil fuels, a decarbonised grid struggles to heat homes in winter; in summer, cooling those same homes presents a far smaller challenge.
The political risk of ideological overreach
For that reason, the conflict over air conditioning has a strong claim to being the culture wars' most counterproductive excrescence. The Western public is broadly supportive of policies to curb global warming, but that support is not unconditional. If it becomes clear that ideology rather than genuine parsimony is responsible for sweltering offices, sleepless bedrooms, and endangered grandparents, the ideology itself will be threatened. Buoyed by well-intentioned public backing, the left has dangerously overreached in its hostility to air conditioning, just as it has overreached on multiculturalism and net zero.
Global competitors treat cooling as infrastructure
Europe and Britain still hope, perhaps, to set a virtuous example to the world, to atone for the original sin of industrialisation and to demonstrate moral leadership. But no one will follow a continent into a sweltering cul-de-sac. Air conditioning is a technology of tremendous importance to a country's prosperity and wellbeing. In one of his first acts as Singapore's prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew had units installed in buildings where his civil service worked, hailing it as "key to public efficiency". China, aided by government subsidies, now has more home air-conditioning units than it has homes. Even today, the US government conducts research through its National Labs to make the technology cheaper and more effective.
If a continent decides instead to become a 4,000-square-mile armpit, it should not be surprised if it inspires few imitators. In the 21st century, we find it unconscionable that the Aztecs cut out prisoners' hearts to feed the sun god; yet we ourselves are sacrificing our elderly to that same deity's heat.
A path forward for the Old World
If Europe and Britain were to play to their strengths, they would be optimising air-conditioning technology. Rather than accept the ugly units that blemish American suburbs, the Old World could develop more tasteful ways of retrofitting the technology, even combining it, as progressive academics suggest, with indigenous European building styles.
And if the anti-AC lobby remains stubbornly committed to heatwaves au naturel, it should recall an additional expression of thermodynamics. No matter how much of it is produced, hot air will always dissipate.