Why Britain needs air conditioning now
Arguments against the mass adoption of air conditioning in the UK and the rest of Europe once made sense, but not any more. Why have times changed?
Why is air conditioning becoming a necessity?
Until recently, the UK scarcely needed to consider air conditioning; now it is a pressing economic and political issue. A sweaty, sleep-deprived country is wondering what has happened to the traditionally underwhelming British summer – the “three fine days and a thunderstorm” of blessed memory. For centuries, summer's lease hath, famously, had “all too short a date”.
This year, though, it's an all too long one – kicking off with a killer heatwave in May, and smashing temperature records before we even got to July. The Climate Change Committee warns that 92% of homes are at risk of overheating by 2050 because they are “built for a climate that no longer exists”. If you live in a sweltering flat in a city, or have a bedroom at the top of a loft-converted house, you'll already know that.
How has the heatwave affected Britain?
Tens of millions of people across southern England have been unable to sleep properly, or have had their working lives upended by the failures of public transport or the closure of overheating schools. Writ large, all that makes for a massive public-health and economic issue that we are only beginning to understand.
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Extreme heat is especially hard to cope with for older adults and those already ill: the summer of 2022 caused 60,000 excess deaths across Europe (according to a 2023 paper in Nature), the vast majority among people aged over 65. The World Health Organisation puts the number even higher, at 175,000 a year. Extreme heat hits children even harder, says George Monbiot in The Guardian. They have higher metabolisms and lower sweating rates, and their thermal comfort levels are, on average, 1.9˚C-2.8˚C lower.
What a heatwave means for the UK economy
Researchers at insurance group Allianz have found that extreme heat is now a “structural economic risk” for Europe. Productivity losses intensify sharply above a critical 30˚C threshold – a three percentage point decrease in productivity for each degree of heat – and cooling costs rise sharply.
Under an entirely possible stress-test scenario – in which the five hottest years between 2014 and 2024 are repeated sequentially over the next five years – they project a hit to output of 5%-7% for the most exposed economies: $240 billion for France, $147 billion for Italy, $131 billion for Germany and $120 billion for Spain (the UK wasn't included in the study).
“The heatwave is not an exception, it is a direction,” said Katharina Utermohl, one of the co-authors. “Extreme heat costs all of us as workers, as businesses, as taxpayers, and there is a difference between countries that adapt and those that wait.”
Will air conditioning save us?
It will certainly be part of the response, along with other cooling measures. Air conditioning has emerged in recent weeks as the new hot topic in the online culture wars, with American blowhards bashing lily-livered Europeans for being too soft to fire up the air-con and cool themselves down.
The difference in take-up is indeed stark. In Europe, only around 19% of homes have air conditioning compared with 88% in the US. That's largely because Europe's housing stock is much older than in the US and its mitigations against heat – thick walls, small windows, shutters and so on – have developed over centuries.
Europe has also been cautious about widespread adoption of a technology, which, bluntly, can easily disfigure the built environment. But the reality is that the take-up of air-con in Europe is already rising due to the heating climate, with southern Europe being first to embrace it.
Is Europe warming up to air conditioning?
Penetration has doubled in Europe overall since 1990, but in hot countries it has risen much faster. More than half of Italian homes now have air conditioning, a doubling since 2013 – a trend that's true of the continent as a whole. In France, 28% of homes now have air-con, in Germany it's 6%, and in the UK 4%, a doubling in the past three years.
There's no reason to think that trend won't continue and accelerate, even without the promptings of US observers. Europe's climate is heating faster than any other continent (due to its proximity to the north pole). As that continues, it will seem ever more silly to argue that heating homes to a safe, liveable temperature is necessary, but that cooling them to the same level – saving lives and making life bearable – is somehow an extravagance that should be frowned upon.
Is air conditioning bad for the environment?
Environmentalists have long argued that it contributes to global heating by consuming energy and raising temperatures in urban areas. That is reflected in official policies. The government denies there's an “air-con ban”, but nor is it straightforward to install. Most homes don't need formal planning permission for air conditioning, which falls under “permitted development”. But that does not include flats – often more difficult to keep cool than houses – where planning permission is required, and is hard to get. The rules require developers to prioritise passive cooling and use air-con as a last resort.
What needs to change?
Policymakers need to catch up with changes to the climate and technology and let the market get on with meeting growing demand, says John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times.
The rising demand for air conditioning now aligns with the rapidly rising supply of solar energy, which will be most abundant when it is most needed to power cooling. Moreover, the potential for air-to-air heat pumps both to heat and cool buildings without burning gas means that the net impact on emissions could even be negative.
“Far from encouraging this, regulations in countries including the UK and France continue to disincentivise and even restrict these technologies.” That's not sustainable. There were once sound arguments against Europe adopting air-con en masse, but that's no longer the case.
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