This summer, a transatlantic culture war has centered on an unlikely place: air conditioning.
Last weekend, I arrived in Paris at the beginning of a heat wave, or heat wavethat has paralyzed the country and most of Europe. Temperatures in France have risen to record highs, reaching near 112 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the country. Several young children have died in parked cars, and the French government reported earlier this week that dozens of people had drowned in waterways while seeking relief from the heat. Many more are hospitalized. World Health Organization estimates that more than 175,000 people die from heat-related causes every year across Europe. Although such calculations are not perfectthere are legitimate concerns that this summer could be very bad.
Some commentators in the United States have taken the opportunity to lecture Europeans, and perhaps even indulge in a little schadenfreude. “Just install a freaking AC and save your grandma’s life, Euro friends!” noted economics writer Noah Smith posted on X. “I asked Claude about the climate debate in Europe, and he pulled no punches,” Patrick Collison, Stripe’s CEO, wrote in a viral post. The AI model told Collison that the “deep talk” used to justify the AC shortage in Europe “is largely a way of dealing with the psychological discomfort of admitting that America’s approach to summer was right all along.” Elon Musk retweeted the comment, calling it a “banger.”
Many Americans seem scandalized that most Western Europeans do not accept the technological miracle of AC. But the disagreement has little to do with objective variables—such as the effects of climate change in Europe, which are on the rise. twice as fast as an international average—rather than subjective questions about what constitutes an acceptable level of physical suffering and sacrifice. As someone who divides his time between the United States and France, I have seen firsthand how Americans tend to interpret disruption as an infrastructural failure, while Europeans seem more willing to see it as part of life. These differing opinions have resulted in too much air conditioning on one side and not far enough on the other.
For many Parisians who are not in a medically vulnerable situation, the past week has not been as dire as media accounts have suggested. The Parisians have rolled with the heat; It certainly hasn’t stopped them from moving on with their lives. Coffee and ice cream parlors are full. A revolving outdoor fête Music Last Sunday attracted half a million beauties. Throughout the summer, men’s fashion week parties have spilled onto the streets. My son’s school, like many schools in France, asked parents to keep children indoors due to the lack of climate control. Yet everyone I know found a way to control it, and some took turns shepherding groups of children to pools and museums.
The traditional French residence was designed to breathe in the summer months. Even if the architects of my building didn’t expect global warming, their handiwork, along with the tiny house, has made the past week bearable. When I enter the house, I cover myself with water and drink more than usual. Like my neighbors, I close my windows behind metal shutters to block the midday sun and open them when it’s windy in the evening. Otherwise, to keep the air from turning, I run two purifiers. I’m sure it would feel different if I were under one of the heat-absorbing zinc roofs that are common in Paris, but living on the ground floor, I haven’t even felt the need to buy a fan yet. Temperatures have certainly been dropping by French standards, but no worse than the hottest summer days of my childhood in New Jersey or my college years in Washington, DC.
I wouldn’t have realized there was such a big problem if I hadn’t been plugged into the X. Underlying the ongoing debate online is a fundamental divide over how America and Europe deal with disruption. Americans are accustomed to treating heat specifically and physical stress more broadly as challenges to be overcome rather than states of resilience. This is in line with our self-concept as optimizers and experts. The United States has spent decades engineering indoor environments—offices, cars, stores, homes—where conditions like refrigeration are commonplace.
For many Europeans, however, the prevalence of air conditioning in the United States contributes to the perception of Americans as wasteful and pampered. American supermarkets that open their doors on hot days and blow polar air at passers-by are a sign of perverted excess in the eyes of Europeans, who pride themselves on small but thrifty displays: saving water when washing dishes; wearing extra layers instead of turning warm in winter; cleaning the dishes during dinner. These are people who still have memories of war, work, and extreme poverty. The idea that America is a country of wealth while Europe runs on scarcity mentality is an understatement for a reason.
Neither side, strictly speaking, responds to the weather. Instead they appear to be based on a different set of values and norms regarding consumption, noise, pollution, and even the importance of public beauty, all of which help determine whether the physical sensation of heat is a problem in the first place. For example, Paris has an aesthetic aversion to window units and rooftop HVAC systems, which helps explain why air conditioning installations require special permission from the authorities, especially in protected or historic areas. This is, after all, a town where hanging clothes to dry from your windows is illegal. Those regulations may seem strict, but they help preserve the city’s unique appeal.
I find that my thoughts on temperature depend on where I am. In the US, don’t hesitate to turn on the AC. But when I’m in Paris, there’s something satisfying, maybe even a little dignified, about braving the heat without the help of climate control.
One of Nietzsche’s many excellent and provocative insights On top of Genealogy of Morals is that pain is not objective or proportional to external conditions, but is a matter of perception and therefore interpretation. This truth holds for individuals as well as for society. That’s why, on one side of the Atlantic, super-cooled offices and subways require wearing fur in August. On the other hand, too many buildings feel like saunas.
A growing divide has also emerged inside Europe. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party has done just that opportunistic arrest in the air conditionerpresenting it as an urgent quality-of-life issue that ethical environmentalists and extreme technologists have neglected. As a result, the right has fragmented what should be a meaningless debate, in the same way that some American conservatives have turned masking into a form of political organizing.
A middle way is possible. For European leaders, it will mean more reform and consolidation air conditioners especially in schools, public transport, and hospitals, where the heat has caused damage. On Thursday, which surpassed Wednesday as the hottest day in France on record, a bus driver was reported he fainted from the heat and hit a tree on the western edge of Paris. Maternity wards are available overheatinghundreds of thousands of the chickens have perishedand cities across the country ban on the sale of alcohol and public consumption in an effort to reduce the burdened health care system. Americans may be heat tolerant, but this is ridiculous.
When I got into the taxi at the beginning of the heat wave, the driver left the windows open. The wind felt like a dryer. We drove like that for more than 10 minutes until we entered the highway and he agreed, turned on the AC. His tendency to sweat it, however well-intentioned, was unacceptable.
