I Lasted Nine Days Without AC. Europeans Don’t Have A Choice.

I’m on day nine of no air conditioning in my Washington, D.C. apartment. The building decided to upgrade the HVAC systems in the dead of June. In one of the swampiest cities in America.

I feel like a European.

And I hate it.

The silver lining (if you can call slow-roasting inside your own home a silver lining) is that I now have some sympathy for the people forced to endure this reality year in and year out. Not because of broken buildings or bad timing, but because their governments decided that sweating to death is a form of environmental virtue.

They are wrong. Catastrophically and lethally wrong.

Europe’s anti-AC policies are doing almost nothing to stop climate change. They are, however, killing people. According to the WHO, Europe averages more than 175,000 heat-related deaths every single year. In 2024 alone, a peer-reviewed study published in Nature Medicine put the summer death toll at nearly 63,000, compared to roughly 2,400 in the United States that same year.

So Europe, with a population just 40% larger than ours, is losing tens of thousands of people to heat every summer, while we lose thousands. The difference isn’t climate, it’s ideology. The EU’s Green Deal and its accompanying “degrowth” ideology — the belief that every kilowatt of energy consumed is a sin against the planet — have spent decades actively discouraging AC installation, mandating carbon-neutral buildings, and pushing “passive cooling solutions” like fans and open windows. The result is not a greener planet, but a deadlier one.

The European heat death toll is twelve times America’s gun homicide rate. Liberals will go on and on about “genocides” in their favorite third-world countries, yet never say a peep about the grim-heater knocking on thousands of their neighbors’ doors every single summer. No marches. No hashtags. No candlelight vigils.

Just grandma dying because a bureaucrat decided a thermostat was too carbon-heavy.

And right now, it’s happening again. France is currently in the grip of a historic June heatwave. Fifty-four of its 96 departments are under red alert as of this week. Schools are closed, trains are canceled – the whole catastrophe is being compared to the 2003 heat wave that killed an estimated 15,000 people. Already, 40 people have drowned in rivers and lakes, jumping in to escape the heat. Only about 20% of French homes have air conditioning.

According to Le Parisien, one 67-year-old woman is enduring 90-degree temperatures inside her home, so dizzy she can barely stand. Her survival strategy: three to four cold showers a day and hosing down her house with a garden hose.

The garden hose.

Meanwhile, the French ecological transition agency advises that even the elderly shouldn’t set their AC below 79 degrees Fahrenheit. For everyone else — the pregnant, the chronically ill, the merely human — the French public health agency has assembled a truly heroic list of tips: “Wear a hat.” “Bend your legs regularly.” Eat “water-rich foods like cold soups.” Avoid using “your oven, computer, hairdryer.” “Dim the lights.”

They might as well hand out paper-free pamphlets on how to write a will and what to wear at your own funeral.

Dying because European governments won’t permit a box that sucks heat out of your living room. Welcome to the third world, Europe.

The climate scolds’ math doesn’t even work. Cooling accounts for roughly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If every European turned on an air conditioner tomorrow, models project it might add 0.05 degrees Celsius to global temperatures by 2050. That’s not saving the planet. That’s a rounding error.

Meanwhile, the bodies keep piling up from actual heat exhaustion. Studies show proper air conditioning slashes the risk of dying on brutally hot days by 75%. The U.S. figured this out decades ago and now has near-universal AC with a tiny fraction of Europe’s heat-death toll despite plenty of nasty summers.

In fact, cold-related deaths across the globe still substantially outnumber heat-related deaths. Over time, moderate warming could actually reduce net temperature-attributable mortality in many regions by cutting cold deaths faster than it raises heat deaths. So the entire premise that keeping Europeans sweltering indoors is some heroic act of planetary sacrifice falls apart on its own terms. They’re not preventing deaths. They’re just redistributing them.

Get Europe some air conditioning. Cut the heat deaths. And maybe even reduce cold deaths down the road. Bingo.

Because grand-mère isn’t dying from climate change. She’s dying because some bureaucrat in Paris decided sweltering until she’s six feet under was virtuous.

And I’m dying because my building decided June was a great time to upgrade the HVAC.

But at least I know it’s coming back. For far too many Europeans, it was never there at all.