An portable air-conditioner hose peeking out of an apartment window in Paris on June 26, 2026. Photo: Benjamin Girette/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Europe’s brutal, deadly heat wave, the second time the continent been trapped under a heat dome this year, is finally ending after the extreme weather broke temperature records and upended daily life for nearly two weeks across the continent. Unfortunately, Europe is both by far the world’s fastest-warming region and a place where the vast majority of people didn’t need air conditioners before climate change started messing up the weather. Fewer than 20 percent of Europeans have air-conditioning, as opposed to nearly 90 percent of Americans, and while you’d think Europe’s governments and people would be rushing to fully integrate ACs into their cooling arsenal, that’s no simple task for a variety of reasons. Though air-conditioner sales continue to rise, and stores across the continent definitely sold out of them over the past few weeks, this latest heat wave has fueled a raging political debate, not to mention a feeding frenzy by bewildered critics here in the U.S. Here’s a look at some of the notable moments and arguments.
At Heatmap, Robinson Meyer goes through some facts and figures regarding the state of Europe’s air-conditioning:
Only 0.8% of European household energy use goes to space cooling. Again, for comparison, that’s about half the share of energy that goes to space cooling in Canada. (In the U.S., about 6% of household energy use goes to space cooling — and despite our warmer climate, far more energy on average goes to space heating in the winter.)
That said, Europe is catching up fast, particularly in warm countries. Air conditioning penetration has more than doubled in Europe since 1990. More than half of Italian households now have air conditioning. That rate has nearly doubled since 2013, and it has grown much faster in southern Italy than northern Italy.
The further north you go, the more the rates fall. About 28% of French homes and 13% of apartments have some kind of air conditioning. Only about 6% of German homes have AC.
Just over 4% of British homes have air conditioning. What’s most striking to me, though, is that the elderly are most susceptible to heat-related death — and only 3% of households with someone over 75 in the UK have AC.
Josh Barro tries to summarize some of it at his Substack:
Europe is not actually poor. Japan is about as wealthy as Europe, and almost all Japanese homes are air-conditioned. Europeans could afford to air-condition their homes (and their hospitals!) just like the Japanese do. But even if an individual European wants to buy an AC unit, local regulatory bodies often step in to block them. In London, the Camden Council, for example, may demand evidence that you exhausted other options on the “cooling hierarchy,” such as ceiling fans, before you’re allowed to install air conditioning. Authorities in Geneva require a doctor’s note before you can air condition your own private home. Just as importantly, many European consumers have convinced themselves that conditioned air is undesirable: some of them, honest-to-god, believe AC causes dangerous “thermal shock” (« choc thermique ») to the body and that it is safer to just suffer in the heat.
There is also a political element: while leftists in the United States seek to establish a human right to air conditioning, French leftists dismiss air conditioning as right-wing. This is a reason I’m proud to be American: the American right loves to complain about the American left promising “free stuff,” but at least our right and our left are both in favor of stuff.
In France, far-right National Rally (RN) party leader Marine Le Pen has once again seized on a heat wave to try to squeeze some populism out of the country’s lack of air-conditioning, as Le Monde reported last week:
After years of denial, the RN now cites the experts’ repeated warnings about the nature and scale of global warming, though it mainly uses IPCC reports as a way to denounce the government’s lack of preparation for France’s latest heat wave. “The government is there to give direction, to make a decision – yes or no, for air conditioning (…) and to drive the implementation of that decision, including through local authorities, but first through the sectors they oversee. That is all we are asking of them,” RN leader Marine Le Pen said sternly on Friday, during a visit to the VivaTech trade fair.
In the face of France’s record temperatures in May and June, Le Pen claims to have the solution: A “major air conditioning equipment plan,” which she first mentioned in a June 30, 2025, post on X, without giving any further details. Since then, the party has never actually officially presented or drawn up a budget for the measure, though it has disparaged all those – whether politicians or scientists – who questioned the effectiveness or sustainability of their vague proposal.
RN also called for ACs in hospitals, schools, and nursing homes during the first heat wave of the year. El Pais adds:
The divide is evident in the press: “France is, absurdly, against air conditioning,” ran the economic daily Les Echos. Atlantico wrote that “environmentalists have deprived France of air conditioning.” Local outlet Ouest France called it “air conditioning: an individual solution but a collective failure,” while Libération labeled it “an ecological contradiction.”
France began embracing air conditioners and other more aggressive cooling strategies more than two decades ago after more than 14,000 people suffered heat-related deaths during a horrifying heat wave in the summer of 2003 — which killed tens of thousands of people across Europe.
Another major moment of the online debate was a clip from a Good Morning Britain segment that seemingly pits former Love Island contestant Shaughna Phillips against climate activist Kush Naker on the question: Is it selfish to get air-conditioning?
It appears a lot of people sharing the clip either didn’t watch it or assumed Naker was arguing that getting an AC was indeed a selfish act. But both in the clip and the full segment, he carefully stresses that he isn’t against air-conditioning, which saves lives, or against individual AC use, but argues instead that people need to realize that unless air conditioners are 100 percent powered by renewable energy, AC use has a net negative impact on the climate.
The British love having their own words (and spellings) for things, and air-conditioning is no exception. The technology is novel enough that it somehow earned its own British slang nickname: air-con (not be confused with the bonkers 1997 Nicolas Cage action film Con Air). This term is also used in Australia, where air-conditioning is now normal.
Last week on X, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shared a take from Anthropic’s Claude, which belittled Europe’s concerns about air conditioners and reduced the whole debate to “the American approach to summer was correct all along.”
Elon Musk then retweeted it, calling the post a “banger” — and the post went viral. That was also one of the big reasons that …
Europe’s AC deficit and perceived resistance to the tech became a main conversation on X, prompting additional popular posts like this one from Noah Smith:
And there were memes:
And not surprisingly (and not without reason), the debate on X largely lambasted European regulatory impediments and how governments have responded to the crisis. For instance:
One of the most striking examples of weird government pushback about air conditioners emerged in Belgium, as the New York Times reported on Friday:
In the Belgian city of Ghent, which is run mostly by left-of-center politicians, the municipal website this week discouraged citizens from using air-conditioners, saying that “the best air-conditioner is a tree” and advising they use fans and request a free tree to plant outside their houses. …
After The New York Times sent a request for comment, Ghent removed wording that read “avoid air-conditioners,” replacing it with the phrase “cool smartly.” Thomas Dierckens, a spokesman for the mayor of Ghent, said in a written comment that the city was not against air-conditioning — noting that it had installed 30 portable air-conditioners into day care centers this week. “Health always comes first” in a heat wave, he said.
Politico EU reports on the partial AC shutdown at the EC’s HQ in Brussels on Friday:
Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”
The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above. …
The Commission issued guidance for its staff earlier this week, which included avoiding going outside at the hottest times of day, drinking water regularly and starting work earlier. But the advice angered some Commission staff who work in buildings without air-conditioning, including DG AGRI, according to internal communications seen by POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook.
“It’s like feudalism,” a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont, granted anonymity to speak freely, told POLITICO on Friday, referring to the fact that upper floors housing commissioners got to keep their AC on. A second official agreed it was a “disgrace.”
That’s what the Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams reports/theorizes from Paris, where he says he wasn’t aware of the great AC debate until he saw it playing out on X:
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 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.