What makes America great?
Our representative Republic? Our embrace at the Constitutional level of the Rights of Man? Baseball, hot dogs and apple pie?
Sure.
But as we head into a hot, muggy weekend, and as I sit in my second-floor home office remembering what days like this felt like before my humble window air conditioner arrived, I'll give a brief nod to Victor Hugo and Andrew Lloyd Webber and say we are "Less Miserable".
Europeans don't do air conditioning. Partly because it's never been part of their culture, and partly because Net Zero madness has driven the price of energy through the uninsulated roofs.
It was a point of pride for them until recently:
For decades in Europe, leaders and scholars scoffed at U.S. reliance on air conditioning as another example of American excess. In 1992, Cambridge economist Gwyn Prins warned that “physical addiction to air-conditioned air is the most pervasive and least noticed epidemic in modern America.”
Air-conditioned offices are commonplace in Europe, but it is exceedingly rare to find AC units in homes. According to one industry estimate, just 3 percent of homes in Germany and less than 5 percent of homes in France have air conditioning. In Britain, government estimates suggest that less than 5 percent of homes in England have AC units installed.
Part of this is because, historically, there was simply far less reason to cool the air in Paris, France, than in Paris, Tex. European countries had warm summers, but they rarely reached the sort of persistently high temperatures seen in the American South.
And even on scorching-hot days, the air in Rome was unlikely to be as humid as in Seoul, Tokyo or Washington. In Britain, better known for damp than heat, houses were traditionally built to retain warmth rather than expel it.
But the chortling is over: it's costing Europe much more than just money:
Across Europe, more than 50 countries “are paying the ultimate price”, said WHO Regional Director Dr. Hans Kluge, only days since Earth recorded its warmest average temperature yet, at 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.89 Fahrenheit), and as exhausting summer heatwaves hit across the northern hemisphere.
Dr. Kluge said that the three warmest years on record in Europe have all happened since 2020 and that the 10 hottest years have all been charted since 2007.
That is quadruple the number of Americans killed by guns from all causes (48,000, of whom 32-36,000 are suicides) in a bad year, in a population a little larger than the US.
Brits are buying air conditioners are a record pace - scolded all the way by their betters in the laptop class:
Firstly, if Brits rush to get AC, we're just contributing to the climate crisis.
"By using air conditioning, we’re still burning fossil fuels and adding to that problem of climate change," Alexander Buck, a sustainability specialist at the architecture firm Buckley Gray Yeoman (BGY), told the Independent.
"It's a self-perpetuating circle - we use more air conditioning, then we make the climate warmer, and then we’re going to need more air conditioning."
But demand for AC is straining power grids - whose capacity, it's not really emphasized, has been atrophied by two decades of Net Zero:
The IEA has warned of a potential “cool crunch” as global demand for air conditioning outpaces electrical grids and energy supplies. Europe’s current heat wave has coincided with government demands for consumers to use less energy amid concerns about the supply of gas from Russia.
Anyway - sorry Europe. Feel free to pop on my sometime this summer, though. You bring the beer. I'll crank the AC.
