Do you know who Willis Havilland Carrier is? No? Maybe you should. He’s the engineer who, way back in 1902, invented what we now call air conditioning. His invention has been cooling American houses and businesses ever since. But it’s also done something even more important: Saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Think that’s hyperbole? It isn’t.
As America prepares for yet another long, hot summer, most of us will stay indoors to work and relax. Why? When the torrid weather arrives, we simply turn on our air conditioning and immediately feel cool air filling our rooms and making us comfortable.
But comfort is a bonus to AC’s real impact: saving lives.
Heat is a killer, as we’ve noted before. Here in the U.S., where air conditioning is found in nearly 90% of all homes and virtually all office buildings, deaths from excessive heat are relatively rare. In 2024, there were 2,394 deaths from excessive heat in the U.S.
Compare the U.S. total to the EU, where there are regularly far more deaths from heat than in the U.S. Last year, for example, from June through September, the EU had 62,755 heat-related deaths, or 26 times more than the U.S. in 2024. Here’s another shocking statistic: The EU heat-death total is more than total U.S. deaths annually from gun violence (44,447 for all of 2024).
Ponder that for a minute.
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