Europe’s heat wave tragically demonstrates the need for air conditioning   

Western European nations take a very different approach from the United States on many issues — immigration, defense, welfare, energy, health care, and more. Each summer also offers a cautionary tale about their dangerously misguided opposition to air conditioning.

The recent heat wave across Europe is exacting a death toll that is both tragic and unnecessary. Similar or even higher summer temperatures here in the US have far less effect because nearly 90 percent of American residences are air conditioned. Indeed, research shows that heat-related deaths have plummeted in the US over the past half century during which air conditioning became common. Access to air conditioning reduces mortality risk by 75 percent. One study estimates 18,000 American lives saved each year because of it.

But only 19 percent of European households have air conditioning. Part of that difference can be explained by relatively milder summers than in most of the US, but much is also due to a policy war on air conditioning.

The environmental movement has spent decades targeting air conditioning. First, it was the fear that the refrigerants commonly used in these systems were thinning the earth’s ozone layer, leading to their phaseout under the UN’s 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (Montreal Protocol). Years later, the supposedly ozone-friendly substitute refrigerants came under fire as contributors to climate change, resulting in the 2016 Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol restricting them as well. Consequently, most cooling systems made today run on third-best refrigerants that both cost more and don’t work as well as they would if environmentalists had found something else to pick on.

In addition to these global measures, the European Union also has restrictions on refrigerants as well as nation-level regulations targeting cooling more directly — all part of Europe’s aggressive climate agenda. For example, France strongly disincentivizes landlords from providing air conditioning, and some Londoners have reportedly been forced to remove air conditioners from their homes, in compliance with net-zero requirements. Parts of Switzerland require proof of medical need before allowing air conditioning to be installed in a residence.

Those policies come on top of renewable energy mandates and other climate measures that have made European electricity prices at least twice as high as those in America — enough that even Europeans with air conditioning may hesitate to use it very much.

Simply put, Europe treats air conditioning as part of the problem when it should be considered a big part of the solution.

Convincing the American people to follow Europe and forego air conditioning would seem a very tough sell, but the environmental activist community has already had some successes making it costlier. The US signed onto the UN provisions restricting refrigerants on climate change grounds and enacted parallel domestic measures that have already added around $1,500 to the cost of a new residential central air conditioning system. The equipment manufacturers have frequently supported such measures, which hand them a captive market for supposedly greener but undeniably costlier systems.

Additional rules that raise the cost air conditioning remain entirely possible — all it would take is for the political winds to shift enough for climate activists to be the ones calling the shots again and for opportunistic manufacturers to support such measures.

Instead of continuing down this harmful path, Congress and President Trump should work to repeal the price-raising measures already in place. The sad and avoidable events unfolding across Europe ought to serve as a reminder that air conditioning should be as affordable as possible.