Outside the Beltway

Cooling Europe

Climate change is forcing a rethink on AC.

James Joyner · Sunday, June 28, 2026 · 1 comment

The ongoing European heat wave has generated a lot of discussion about air conditioning.

Beth Gardiner, The Atlantic (“Europe’s Come-to-AC Moment“):

In stifling apartments and sweaty row houses in England, Germany, and even Scandinavia, some Europeans are considering a very American idea: They really need an air conditioner.

One of their most accessible options, though, might feel unfamiliar to anyone accustomed to central air. Among Europe’s commonly used types of air conditioning is a clunky, inefficient unit that stands a few feet high and has a wide exhaust tube meant to go out a window. Such units are typically “a panic-buy on a hot weekend,” Brian Motherway, the head of energy efficiency at the International Energy Agency, told me. People grab the first machine they see and end up living with it for a decade, he said. Many people leave the window gap around the exhaust tube uncovered, letting hot air right back in. Walking down a Paris street last week, I saw three different stores where such units stood beside a door propped open by the tube.

[…]

Much of Europe wasn’t built for air-conditioning, or for coping with hot weather at all. In Britain, for instance, which has been long accustomed to cool summers and dark, rainy winters, older houses like mine are poorly insulated and often leave inhabitants baking when outside temperatures climb. But many newer buildings are designed to retain heat and maximize sunlight, making them also poorly suited for the new normal, Andy Love, a sustainability consultant who founded Shade the UK, an advocacy group that presses for smarter building regulations, told me. However sleek and modern the big glass apartment towers going up around London look, he said that many residents are “moving into those flats in the winter to then find out in the summer, it’s a furnace.” Britain’s Climate Change Committee, which advises the government, put the problem bluntly in a report in May: “The UK was built for a climate that no longer exists.”

[…]

Now Europeans urgently need ways to cool down. Although climate change will cause the biggest absolute increases in heat in African nations, eight of the 10 countries likely to see the most “dramatic relative increases in the number of days that require cooling” are in northwestern Europe, a study by researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Bristol found. That list includes Switzerland, Britain, and Norway, and all of those places, the study warns, are unprepared.

[…]

The shift to AC is happening across Europe, where only about 20 percent of homes currently have air-conditioning. (Compare that with about 90 percent in the United States.) Ownership is skewed toward the south of Europe—about half of homes in Italy and 40 percent in Spain use it, for example. But a survey in Germany found that AC ownership jumped by 6 percent between 2023 and 2024. Even residents of Scandinavia and the Baltic countries are buying air conditioners, Simon Pezzutto, who studies cooling demand at the Institute for Renewable Energy at Eurac Research, in Northern Italy, told me.

[…]

In Europe, where electricity prices are significantly higher than in the United States and incomes are typically lower, the price of cooling can mean a painful surprise when the power bill comes. If air-conditioning use spikes rapidly, it could also burden a grid that is not yet ready for big new peaks.

Henry Grabar, The Atlantic (“France Is Too Hot for Shutters and Ceiling Fans“):

The position of the French government, and the city of Paris, is that air-conditioning is a “maladaptation” to climate change—a wasteful, antisocial technology that intensifies the very crisis that it purports to address.

But the national consensus underlying that position is beginning to melt as record-breaking heat tests France’s patience and principles. On Tuesday, the country recorded the hottest day in its history. Then again on Wednesday. Thursday was the same. The high temperature in Paris has been more than 96 degrees for 10 straight days, topping out at 105 this week.

France has been slow to recognize that many buildings need stronger medicine than shutters, ceiling fans, and a good night breeze—and they need it now. This has left the country exposed on multiple fronts. The far right has capitalized on the present social breakdown—closed schools, canceled trains, overloaded hospitals—to proclaim itself the party of air-conditioning, turning a complicated technical question into a culture-war cudgel. Meanwhile, in the absence of clear and easy guidance, air-conditioning is proliferating through French cities in its worst forms—in many cases, a tube spilling scorching air out of an open door or window—as desperate residents adopt inefficient or illegal solutions. Finally, and most important, underestimating the need for AC has left millions of people suffering through the hottest days of their lives with no recourse.

[…]

France’s lack of air-conditioning has been somewhat exaggerated by American pundits. Most white-collar offices are air-conditioned, along with many movie theaters, malls, supermarkets, and shops. Nevertheless, it is true that the French—like Europeans more generally—are skeptical of air-conditioning at home. In a 2021 OpinionWay survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents said that they did not have AC and did not plan to install it, mostly for economic or environmental reasons. More abstract, there is a widespread belief (or there was, before this summer) that AC is a wasteful and distinctly American indulgence. Why not dress down, hydrate, or have lunch in the shade?

Those sentiments have created, and in turn been reinforced by, rules that discourage the technology. In the country’s road map to adapt to global warming, individual air conditioners are presented as harmful. The roots of this position lie in the energy crisis of the 1970s, which prompted most of Europe to tighten its codes so that buildings would be more efficient. That’s been a huge success, but it makes installing air-conditioning in new buildings (outside of heat pumps, which can also cool buildings) all but impossible, Emmanuel Bozonnet, a building-physics expert at La Rochelle Université, told me.

[…]

Paris encapsulates the French AC conundrum: Cooling is both desperately needed and tightly regulated for its negative externalities. According to a 2023 study in The Lancet, the French capital is the European city with the highest risk of excess heat deaths, thanks to a combination of density, demographics, geography, and architecture. In the 2003 heat wave, two-thirds of the Parisian dead had lived in tiny, sweltering top-floor apartments.

The city also has some of the world’s most complicated rules about air-conditioning installation. That is partly rooted in the aforementioned co-op laws and historic-preservation regulations. But it’s also because planners fear the urban-heat-island effect—the local rise in temperatures resulting from urban infrastructure. One study suggests that mass air-conditioning could expel enough hot air to raise the city’s temperature by nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit on the hottest days, and bring more intense localized effects on narrow streets and in building courtyards. Cool air for some would mean hotter air for others.

As a result, getting official approval for even a mini-split—a relatively efficient way to cool a home—is very difficult. Residents of cooler apartments on lower floors aren’t always sympathetic to the plight of those suffering upstairs in the “maid’s rooms,” and don’t want to live next to compressor noise and hot-air exhaust.

The Economist (“Berlin is even worse equipped than Paris for Europe’s heatwave“):

In terms of the probable number of excess deaths, Paris is the city hardest hit by a heatwave that has hovered balefully over Europe since June 17th.

Yet in some ways Paris has adapted better to heat risk than other European cities. After a grim heatwave—la canicule—that killed 15,000 people in 2003, France, and Paris in particular, began making and implementing plans to cope with extreme heat. In contrast, Berlin has scarcely begun working out its approach to a hotter future. As Europe’s tropical weather moves slowly from west to east, temperatures in Paris are edging down. Meanwhile Berlin is expecting to hit 40ºC for the first time on June 28th. It is not prepared.

To say that Paris has taken action is not to say that it is well placed. The city is densely built, and traps the heat in its walls and under its zinc roofs. In its region of northern France just 17% of homes have any form of air-conditioning. Most government buildings in Paris, housed in former mansions, have none (including the offices of the Elysée Palace, the president’s official residence). Fans and portable air-cooling systems have sold out. Schools have been closed and sports events cancelled. Bus drivers have threatened to go on strike unless they get an hour’s break for the heat.

[…]

Berlin, in contrast, has barely begun preparing for recurrent episodes of tropical weather. The city-state’s senate finally passed a Hitzeaktionplan (heat action plan) last November, some 21 years after Paris adopted its first one. The plan envisions renovating buildings to protect them from heat, more drinking fountains, more trees and a network of cooling-off points like the 1,400 in Paris. Eight months later Berlin has exactly one of these, in the Mauerpark north of the city centre. A map to guide citizens to churches and other spots where they can find some shade is still incomplete. The number of drinking fountains has risen since last year—by two, from 248 to 250.

Granting that Northern Europe is generally considerably cooler in the summer than most of the United States and that buildings on the continent are often considerably older, it’s remarkable to me that adoption of air conditioning has been so slow. Even as a kid in Germany in the 1970s, the technology would have been welcome.