Heat mortality has also been increasing in Europe: Summer 2022 saw an estimated ~68,000 heat-related deaths, 2023, ~50,800; 2024, ~62,800. The WHO European Region reports that heat mortality is up by about 30 percent over two decades.
This post shows that Europe largely chooses these deaths through a long resistance to a 1902 invention that the rest of the rich world treats as an incredible benefit of modern technology — air conditioning.
This post on the human toll of Europe’s aversion to airconditioning was motivated by three essays:
- Make Europe Cool Again by Kevin Kohler details how French and Swiss rules deter installed AC.
- How Europe Became the World Champion of Heat Deaths by Maarten Boudry traces the aversion to a deeper hostility toward energy.
- Air conditioning: saving lives and accelerating net-zero by Ed Hezlet and Lauren Gilbert explain how U.K policies “all but ban” air conditioning, despite its benefits.
I have discussed heat mortality in several posts here at THB:
- In Public Health and Climate Change, I walked through the Sheridan et al. (2021) data showing U.S. heat mortality falling dramatically across nearly every region over fifty years even as heat waves grew more frequent.
- In Truth Bombs, I showed how a consistent vertical scale reveals that cold still kills far more Europeans than heat — a point that Bjorn Lomborg has made for years.
In today’s post I ask and answer a straightforward question:
If Europe had air conditioner penetration approaching levels of the U.S. or Japan, what would we expect the effects to be on heat mortality?
I provide my methods, data, and sources in an Excel file at the bottom of the post.
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