Faux Morality in Europe: Air Conditioning

I am starting a new series called "Faux Morality in Europe." This series will focus on things I have experienced in Europe as an American that are more virtue signalling than they are actual moral or ethical stances. Why am I focusing on Europe and not other parts of the world? That is an excellent question to which I have an answer. In my travels, I have been preached to and at by Europeans about how Americans do or don't do things, ranging from firearms to environmentalism to "militant individualism." Honestly, it has annoyed me for more than two years, especially as Americans back home jump on the European bandwagon of criticizing the United States without fully evaluating their positions or behaviours. Will this series offend people? Yes, but if it offends you, I would argue that is because it hits too close to home and not because what I have said is factually incorrect.

So, first up in this series is air conditioning.

If you have travelled to Europe, be it Spain, France, Poland, the United Kingdom, or just about anywhere else, chances are you have stayed somewhere without air conditioning. During the day (especially late afternoon in the summer), homes, restaurants, and shops become hot and stuffy with only a cracked window to provide relief. That window, however, may not open that much. In many hostels, there is only a narrow window near the ceiling, and in the UK, windows can legally open ten centimetres if the building is considered a "high risk" for children falling out of them. Combine that with ten or twenty people in a hostel room, and even with the window open, it can be unpleasant to sleep at night for Americans who have air conditioning installed everywhere.

This European opposition to air conditioning is wrapped mainly in environmental concerns. To an extent, those concerns are well founded. In cities like Paris, Madrid, or Rome, where dense population centres occupy massive concrete spaces, adding central heating and air, split-duct, or window units to existing buildings on a large scale risks increasing the local temperature of the cities by five degrees Celsius. Now, because of how air conditioning systems work, that wouldn't contribute to changes in the global climate, but even local changes could yield massive disruptions. So, in that regard, I understand. At the same time, in-home units are available to cool individual rooms when people are present that can be switched off when people are not, thus mitigating the local temperature issue. That solution, though, increases electricity usage, which is still largely derived from fossil fuels, so any local gain is offset at the powerplant. As a matter of priorities, most Europeans value environmental stewardship over personal comfort, a commendable attitude.

Or, at least, it would be if not for a key fact: more Europeans die from heat-related injuries than Americans die from firearms, both per capita and with raw numbers.

According to the World Health Organisation, their European region (which encompasses 53 countries with a total population of about 940 million people) saw 175,000 heat-related deaths in 2024. By comparison, the United States (with a population of about 340 million) only had 2,000 heat-related death that same year. That's .01862 percent of the European region's population and .00059 percent of the United States'. That number may seem infinitesimal, but you are more than thirty-one times more likely to die in Europe from a heat-related injury than in the United States, despite the United States having areas like Phoenix, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Death Valley in California whose temperatures reach astronomically higher temperatures than European nations not as an occasional heat wave, but as a regular occurrence of summer. Europeans argue that the heat deaths don't happen in homes, but outside where people work and commute. I will cede that argument; however, farmers, ranchers, police officers, firemen, bus drivers, construction workers, lawncare professionals, and more work outside in those environments every day in the United States, yet we don't have the heat death problem that Europe does. Why? Because we have cool spaces to retreat to when we become overheated. Those spaces aren't our cars or supermarkets or cinemas; they are our homes.

As part of their argument against installing air conditionings in their homes, Europeans argue that a phenomenon called "thermal shock" will make you sick and may even induce a seizure. This theory has even been propagated in French newspapers. Unfortunately, it is not grounded in scientific evidence. If it were true, we would see it all over the world, not just in Europe. The Vietnamese who work in hotels and homestays after working in the fields would be falling victim to "thermal shock" every day, as would every construction worker on Interstate 35 in San Antonio's blistering August. But they don't. "Thermal shock" is no more true than "going to bed with your hair wet will cause pneumonia" or "cracking your joints will lead to arthritis" (at least, not at the typical temperature differences between a cooled home and outside in the summer). Too many Europeans have claimed that "the air conditioning made me sick" in hostels, when that is definitively not true (unless, of course, there was something wrong with the aircon, such as mould and or broken filter).

What makes all of this worse? Comparing European heat deaths to American firearm deaths. The Europeans love to rail against America's liberal firearms laws (even in highly-restrictive states, the laws are far laxer than in most mainland European countries). To them, we could solve all of the death and damage from firearms simply by making them illegal and turning them into the government for control or destruction, just as Australia did a few decades ago. The numbers, though, make this critique problematic. In 2024, there were just under 50,000 firearm-related deaths in the United States, including suicides (which are estimated to make up 80 percent of these) and gang violence. That comes out to .01471 percent of the population of the United States dying from firearms, which is still less than Europe's .01862 percent from heat deaths! In fact, combining American firearm and heat deaths yields a .01529 percent fatality rate, which is STILL less than European heat deaths alone.

So, while Europeans want to rail against the pandemic of American gun crime, they themselves have an even worse pandemic of heat-related deaths. If it is so easy for Americans to simply turn in their firearms, isn't it just as easy for Europeans to install air conditioning? After all, the WHO's guidance for mitigating these deaths includes going into a cool space for several hours, such as a supermarket or cinema. Noticeably absent? The home, the place where the most vulnerable to heat injuries, the sick, elderly, and rural labourers, will be.

Thus, my regard for European virtue signalling about air conditioning and environmentalism has zeroed out. While I wish we could snap our fingers and prevent climate change, we can't, and whether we like it or not, the heat waves are here to stay. We can either wring our hands and cry "woe is me" over it, or we can do something to mitigate the impacts. The simplest, most-efficient way to prevent the almost two hundred thousand heat-related deaths in Europe is to make air-conditioned spaces widely available, specifically and especially in the home, just as some of the hottest places on Earth have done without issue or sickness from a pseudo-scientific diagnosis of "thermal shock." Until that happens, I will no longer tolerate Europeans railing against the senseless firearms deaths in my country. Dying from heat injuries that we have the technology but not the social willpower to mitigate seems even more senseless.