As Northwesterners discovered over the summer of 2021, much of the United States and Europe views air conditioning as a luxury, not a necessity.
In this worldview, heating saves lives, while cooling merely keeps people comfortable. Our failure to take extremely hot temperatures seriously is now on a direct collision course with accelerating climate change and ever more frequent deadly heat waves in places that were historically far cooler. And it’s mixed with a preachy, puritanical attitude toward personal decisions that sees air conditioning as an unnecessary luxury that contributes to the disaster, not as a necessity for surviving it.
It’s a little embarrassing to be publicly seen as pro-air conditioning. Coverage of climate change is much more likely to portray running the air conditioner as a planet-destroying act than turning on the furnace. Consider this July 2019 New York Times piece, which asked, and not exactly rhetorically: “Do Americans Need Air-Conditioning?” It’s hard to imagine anyone asking that question about artificial heat.
These intellectual debates over air conditioning far too often fail to consider a rather essential point. Does air conditioning save the lives of people who might otherwise die without it? The answer is, indisputably, yes.
Western cultures view the production of artificial heat as healthy and necessary. By the mid-1800s, Americans had developed a global reputation for massively overheating their buildings (a trait that Charles Dickens famously complained about).
Indoor cooling is a different story. More people do remember a time before it existed.
In American cities in the 1800s—even in the Northeast—people perished regularly in stuffy and crowded homes and apartments. “This is the harvest season for death’s reaper,” the labor leader Charles Stelzle observed of sweltering summers in the poorest areas of New York City. Bacteria thrived in hot and unsanitary conditions, spreading illness.
During heat waves, nighttime, when our bodies require a respite from the daytime heat, is the most dangerous time of all: People who could—largely young men—absconded to sleep in the park or on the roofs of their buildings. (On at least a few occasions, people rolled off the roofs to their deaths.).
But despite all these deaths, when engineer Willis Haviland Carrier installed the first modern air conditioner in a Buffalo printing building in 1902, which cooled the air and controlled humidity, it wasn’t viewed as a lifesaving machine but as a luxurious one.
Advertising for air conditioners in the 20th century focused much more on comfort, lifestyle, and productivity than it did on saving lives—and in doing so created resistance to it.
Air-conditioning detractors like to point out that people managed to survive for millennia without it. From this point of view, sweltering weather is a natural reality that humans shouldn’t meddle with, an attitude that bears some worrisome resemblances to 19th-century Western notions about how people residing in tropical climates were inherently lazy and shiftless.
