The Economist's Charlemagne newsletter this weekend carried an intriguing message. Faced with soaring temperatures across western Europe, it suggested that people should stop feeling guilty about turning on their air conditioning. The argument was that as Europe shifts towards cleaner energy, attitudes towards cooling homes and workplaces need to change.
There is, of course, some necessary truth in this. Extreme heat kills. It particularly threatens older people, young children and those with existing health conditions. Adapting to a hotter climate is not optional. If air conditioning is needed to keep people safe, then it has to be used.
But I could not help feeling that the article was both an admission of failure and a failure to recognise a greater truth.
For decades, we have known that climate change was coming. We have known that Europe's housing stock was poorly adapted to extreme temperatures. We have known that our cities trap heat. We have known that reducing emissions should have been a priority.
And yet here we are. The response being offered is not to prevent the problem, but to consume more energy to cope with its consequences. As an exercise in ignoring the relationship between cause and effect, this takes some beating.
I stress, I am not suggesting that air conditioning is inherently bad. What I am suggesting is that we should not confuse adaptation with a solution. The real challenge is not whether people should feel guilty about cooling their homes. It is how we redesign housing, workplaces, cities and energy systems so that people can live comfortably in a warming world without ever-growing demands for energy and resources.
That means better building standards. It means adopting passive cooling. It means necessary urban greening. It means planning for resilience rather than merely reacting to a crisis. Air conditioning may still be a part of the answer, but the need for ever more of it is also evidence of how badly we have failed to address the underlying problem.
The Economist may be right that Europe needs to rethink its attitudes towards air conditioning, but what Europe really needs to rethink is why it allowed itself to reach this point in the first place.
Europe still needs a Green New Deal. I have been saying so for 18 years now.
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The usual hand wringing from know nothings in the Economist and the EU institutions. The words “hot” and “sunny” usually go together. Roof top PV has a trivial cost, ditto A/C. Until recently, Spanish policy was to mitigate against roof-top PV (due to the influence of the large power companies). California company (look up “Ice Bear”) produced a system which “stored” cold (turned water into ice). Couple that to PV & A/C and you have a system that delivers a very good solution for those “hot” & “sunny” days, even after the sun goes down.
However, following the above tech realities to their logical conclusions, has not & can’t happen in the EU because (mostly) the Bx “village” is filled with know-nothings (aka policy-wonks) in terms of tech understanding & the member states are lobbied to stop the solutions mentioned. Of course, heat is not a problem for the rich (or well off), & the poor don’t count (alive or dead). Thus we have the situation we have. I agree regarding “better insulated houses” but this only works to a certain extent – eventually you need some cooling (or in winter – heating). If you want to see what political failure (& a policy vacuum) looks like – read up on the excess deaths due to heat.
A PS: France, nukes on rivers, prediction: discharge water temps will rise causing river water temps to exceed limits and the nukes will have to start shutting down – just when you need them most… meanwhile EdF (owner of said nukes) continues to lobby against widespread household adoption of PV. You could not make it up.
Here in Tasmania today is the winter solstice. This (lovely sunny) morning I picked the last of the Autumn raspberries but now that the sun is well and truly set we have the heating on. Instead of burning wood, coal, gas or other fossil fuel our heating is via reverse-cycle air conditioning, aka a heat pump. In a temperate climate like this it is possible to heat the inside of a house by refrigerating the outside air, pumping heat uphill from the cold(ish) outside into the inside. The exact same machine can pump heat in the opposite direction to proved what is conventionally called air-conditioning during summer.
Sadly not viable in the colder climes of the UK, this kind of heating is very efficient, it takes about 1kW of electricity to deliver 4kW of heating and, as all of Tasmania’s electricity is derived from hydro, I think we can claim to be a reasonably Green household in at least this respect.
Heat pumps can be used in the UK but only if the reservoir of heat is not simply the outside atmosphere. Ice being a very good insulator, having it build up on your external heat-exchanger is not good.
That is interesting about Tasmania, thanks. Certainly hydro is the most predictable and one of the cheapest sources of low emissions electricity. The ethiopians with enormous amounts of wind and solar they could use are not daft in building their Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam.
It is a shame that in the UK it is illegal thanks to the worst public administrations in our history to build hydro or pumped storage in the few viable places we have for it.
Hydro power is not without its downsides – the history in Tasmania is to say the least interesting.
It has a significant impact on fish populations in particular the many species that live in the sea but spawn in fresh water eg Salmon & Thwaites Shad but ‘lowland’ hydro power could only supply about 10% of the UK’s current electricity demand.
It isnt to say of course that there are not sites that are potentially worth developing and one recent comment was that the UK Government has become obsessed about wind and solar and ignored hydro.
Before the National Grid most towns had their own electricity supplies, Machynlleth & Lynmouth both had hydro schemes as did many farms and business’s – LTC Rolt recalls in Railway Adventure the lights in the Dolgoch Hotel dimming as the water in the reservoir that powered the generator started to run out at about midnight – the power would then be turned off and it would refill overnight.
There are at least two operational hydro sites on the River Frome at Tellisford, one is a small 30’s scheme that has been rebuilt, the other is
https://somersetrivers.uk/hydropower/tellisford-mill/
I understand that after the nationalisation of the electricity industry in 1948 the sort of small schemes like these were effectively closed down and Gilkes who manufactured a lot of the equipment used had to seek orders abroad
Thanks
“I understand that after the nationalisation of the electricity industry in 1948 the sort of small schemes like these were effectively closed down and Gilkes who manufactured a lot of the equipment used had to seek orders abroad”
Thank you John for clarifying the benefits of nationalisation under Attlee, and that there is underutilised hydro potential in the UK if only it were not illegal to utilise it.
Though I’m agnostic about the merits of hydropower, Rob MacFarlane raises many issues about big dams in his recent book – Is a River Alive? – that should be cause for concern.
This all goes back to the previous post about certainty and the true cost of attaining it.
The property industry loves certainty and is conservative mainly because it just wants risk free returns on what it builds and sells. Changing building designs to cope with the climate is just one big inconvenience to them and cam be costly until the supply and design of new tech is up and running to capture economies of scale – this is where our government could help with mitigating the costs of that, never mind changing planning rules. at one stage the obsession was about smaller windows to deal with keeping heat in; now it seems we need larger windows to help circulate air and cool things down. And why do we still have dark heat absorbing tiles on roofs one might ask? We now fit heat and smoke detectors in lofts where there might be batteries and more complicated tech. And why don’t many of our properties have window blinds as they have done in Europe for ages – they really make difference. One thing for sure is that we cannot allow the need to keep cool with A/C simply help someone to exploit the situation for their own gain.
Very many thanks.
Why isn’t anyone listening?
No one is listening because of political connivance with the futures markets Richard. These markets make sure that what can be done now is not done, so that it creates ‘markets’ in the future – ‘markets’ being the coded word for dependencies that can be exploited and monopolized because by leaving it so late, there is little or no choice.
This is commonly known as disaster capitalism.
Replying to both of your posts PSR, the presumption in Bx (& UK) is that markets will deliver a (engineered) solution. My economist friend (now with the Euro Parl) sneers as such an approach – our group knows that the only approach is engineer it first and then drive deployment – steam rollering opposition which usually says that the market has to be “tech neutral”. Utter bollocks from start to finish. Rant over.
Might it be that a majority of European leaders are more interested in retaining power and pleasing their “sponsors” than in dealing with complex matters such as the increasing climate problems?
“For decades we have known that climate change was coming”<p>
No we haven’t Richard. BBC spent ten years platforming Nigel Lawson’s climate denialism to ‘balance’ against the scientific truth.<p>
Even now the media landscape is still not unambiguously pushing the truth that climate change is accelerating and we have to double down on stopping carbon emissions,. <p>
As Richard says, te air conditioner discussion is jus tone of the many confusing distractions offered.<p>
Richard has been right for 18 years – we need a Green New deal – but what are we getting – Miliband been dubbed a net zero fanatic and Tories banging on about drilling more North Sea oil
Sadly, much to agree with.
I live in a stone built mid-terrace house, built around 1910. As it is in north east England excessive heat is rarely a worry at the moment, but, during warmer weather the inside is usually about 5 degrees cooler than the outside. The highest indoor temperature we have experienced since December 2022 (when I started keeping records) was 26.8. Sadly we are not so well protected against cold – the lowest indoor temperature over that period was 11. It seems that heat had less penetration of poor insulation than the cold.
“Adapting to a hotter climate is not optional. If air conditioning is needed to keep people safe, then it has to be used.”
Welcome to Florida!!!!
Based on my experience in Florida, Solar Energy is the way to go.
The investment pays off in less than a ten year period for all new homes and a 15 year period for older homes.