Europe Is Hot as Hell. Why Doesn’t It Want Air Conditioning?

0:05Ryan Knutson:This summer, Europe has been really hot. Hotter than usual. From Paris to Madrid to London, locals and tourists are scrambling to stay cool. There are soaring temperatures with heat alerts and public health measures in place in many countries. The severe heat wave continues to batter us here in France, with temperatures hovering once again across much of the country at around 40 degrees Celsius. Europe has reached a boiling point, perhaps. Yeah, it's reached a sweating point, definitely. Everyone is sweating. Our colleague Matthew Dalton has been covering the heat wave from Paris, where he lives.

0:45Ryan Knutson:What's the weather been like there in Paris? It's been exceptionally hot. It's been hotter than I've ever experienced since I've moved to Europe nearly two decades ago. I think a lot of people are suffering. It's just kind of miserable. Temperatures in Paris recently hit about 104 degrees Fahrenheit. That's only happened on three other days since they began keeping records. The weather is like normally awkward small talk, but here it's actually relevant. Yeah, it's like, how's the weather? That's the big news these days. One reason this is such big news in Europe is because the continent doesn't have nearly as much air conditioning as the U.S.

1:26It depends where you are in the continent. In Southern Europe, there tends to be more air conditioning. Obviously, it's hotter. In Italy, it's around 56%, 57 % of households have air conditioning. In France, a quarter of households have air conditioning. In the U.K., it's around 5%.

1:41Ryan Knutson:Why not just get AC? Well, there's a lot more demand for AC right now, I would say, but there are a lot of obstacles to installing it in the continent. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knickson. It's Tuesday, July 7th.

2:06Coming up on the show, Europe is hot as hell.

2:10Ryan Knutson:Why doesn't it want AC?

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3:28Ryan Knutson:you are from the u.s i can tell by your accent right we'll make the assumption yep grew up in new york city matt has lived in europe for nearly two decades and every time he comes back to america in the summer he's always a little taken aback by how strong the ac is when i visit my family like in the u.s and you know we're staying in the same place at night it's like, you know, maybe 72 degrees, 75 degrees. And yet I hear their air conditioning just like rattling on my way. I'm like, I mean, come on, guys. It's like, it's not that hot out, please. I was back home recently in New York and I went to the supermarket next to my mother's house and I was just like shivering.

4:08It was so cold.

4:09Ryan Knutson:There's a clerk that works at one of my local grocery stores who all summer long is bundled up. Like she's wearing a winter coat and a beanie because it's so cold in there. I mean, I think that's a common thing that Europeans have when they come to the United States is just marveling. Oh, this is glorious. Absolutely glorious. It's like stepping into a fridge. Living the dream. The thought of American air conditioning sends shivers literally through a lot of Europeans for several reasons.

4:41Ryan Knutson:For a long time, most of Europe didn't need air conditioning because Europe's climate has generally been cooler with more mild summers. The main concern for Europeans has been keeping warm in the winter, not staying cool in the summer. When it did get hot, a lot of European buildings had a simple solution, window shutters. At night, you open the windows and shutters to let the cool air in. And then when the sun rises in the morning, you shut them and block out the sun. It works quite well. And then when the sun goes down or when the sun is no longer shining on that part of your residence, you can open the shutters.

5:18The problem is that doesn't work if it doesn't cool down at night, which is what happened in the last heat wave. You know, if the nights are not going to cool down, the whole system that Europe has relied on when it has been hot to keep cool and to keep the heat out kind of doesn't work anymore.

5:35Ryan Knutson:As Europe has gotten hotter, there's been resistance to installing air conditioning. There's a few reasons why. First, AC is expensive. especially in Europe, which is mostly an importer of fossil fuels. Energy is more expensive in Europe. Electricity is more expensive. So consuming energy, you know, paying the bills to run your air conditioning a lot is a more expensive proposition in Europe than it is in the United States. Second, there's a bit of cultural pride in not relying so much on AC. And then there's climate change. Europe has thought to be a climate leader, And people there are concerned about how AC contributes to global warming.

6:15Ryan Knutson:And not just in the long term. There's a lot of concern about the exhaust heat from air conditioners making cities hotter. All the waste heat that is ejected from the back of air conditioners, which warms up a city. You know, you might be talking like one to two degrees Celsius. AC also puts a lot of pressure on the power grid. Then there's the question of just all the additional electricity demand from using air conditioners. Which, you know, in the United States, that's when we had peak electricity demand is when all the air connoisseurs turn on. You know, if there's widespread air conditioner installations, that would probably pretty drastically change the patterns of power demand in Europe.

6:55Ryan Knutson:Matt says there's also an aesthetic concern. Many Parisians, for instance, view air conditioning as not only potentially harmful, but noisy and ugly. The Parisians are, and the French government is very protective of the iconic Haussmannian facade of many buildings in Paris, which is the Haussmannian facade is five stories, limestone, the iconic Paris street that government does not want to allow people to start putting the convector units of the window AC or the convector units through the wall of these facades. they consider that to be a blight on the architecture of France. As a result of the AC resistance, places like schools, public buildings, and even hospitals are often left boiling in a heat wave like the one Europe just had.

7:48It sucks in particular if you're in like a hospital or if you're in a nursing home, many of which are not air-conditioned. The temperature in those places is 35 degrees often, 35 degrees Celsius. That's in the 90s, right? Well, into the 90s.

8:03Ryan Knutson:That's 95 degrees Fahrenheit. There have been reports of medical staff getting sick due to the intense heat in hospitals. There have been a number of factories that have shut down during the heat wave. Others are cutting back their hours, not working during the height of the day. You know, if the temperatures keep moving in this direction, generally speaking, it's going to be a macroeconomic problem. When it gets too hot, schools in Europe close, forcing parents to stay home. Many businesses shut down. Factories cut production. Rail lines get suspended. Economists at the Dutch bank ING said closures during the recent heat wave, quote, brought back memories of the pandemic lockdowns.

8:46Ryan Knutson:And there's a real human toll. Tens of thousands of people die a year from heat-related causes in Europe. That's compared to approximately 1 ,000 in the U.S. Have you started to see that this is changing how people feel about air conditioning at all? It already has changed because just the heat has become too much for many people to bear. I think that there have been a number of public opinion polls that show that more Europeans want air conditioning. Absolutely. I think now that the climate in Europe is warming so quickly, objections are melting. But even when people want AC in Europe, it can be really hard to get.

9:33Ryan Knutson:That's after the break.

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10:17Ryan Knutson:Our colleague Matt spoke to one man in Paris who says he needs air conditioning to survive. And it's still been a huge struggle to get it. Yeah, so he has a rare genetic illness. He has a form of myopathy, and he lives in a wheelchair. He's largely paralyzed. He breathes with a ventilator. And his parents bought him an apartment on the ground floor of a building in the Marais in Paris, which is a very touristy, bustling neighborhood in the center of Paris. And his parents wanted to install an air conditioner in his apartment to make him comfortable. His doctor said he needs it because he breathes with a ventilator.

11:03Ryan Knutson:The man had to get permission from the other apartment owners in the building to install air conditioning, but they said no. His family says they were told the AC unit would be too loud. And if the building made an exception for him, they'd have to make an exception for everybody. So during this latest heat wave, he was quite hot in his apartment. It was not pleasant. And the air conditioning system was, you know, sitting on the floor, ready to be installed, but his parents have taken the neighbors to court, and they've been fighting this for two years and counting. In the midst of this summer's heat wave, AC has become a bigger political issue in a lot of Europe.

11:43There has been a lot of political debate now about air conditioning. In France, the far right, Marine Le Pen's party, has been criticizing the government for not pursuing a major plan of air conditioning investment across institutions, schools, hospitals, nursing homes. The pro-AC camp is generally on the right. They don't want to worry too much about the environmental impact when they're talking about AC. We should invest as needed to be cool in this new era. And I would say generally the more environmentally minded, those on the left, and just a number of people who have a general kind of queasiness, unease about air conditioning.

12:28They say that we're going to need some more air conditioning, but we shouldn't be approaching U.S.-style air conditioning levels.

12:40Ryan Knutson:The pro-AC camp argues that France mainly relies on nuclear and solar power, so that impact could be minimal. One good thing about solar power in particular is that the times when you need air conditioning are the times... ...is when the sun is shining. Exactly. So that's one of the great things about solar electricity. So there are definitely technological solutions. Still, all those environmental, political, and cultural concerns make it an uphill battle for Parisians who want AC. And in Paris, where our colleague Matt is based, there are a lot of rules and red tape to installing it.

13:17The city of Paris is very concerned about people and individual households and apartment owners rushing to all install air conditioning. Like, they consider that to be a big problem. Their attitude is we should have institutions that need it, like hospitals, nursing homes, schools. those should have some air conditioning. I guess offices also should have some air conditioning, but we should do everything possible to avoid like air conditioning on a mass scale. Like they don't want the Paris streets to during the height of summer to sound like a New York city street during a heat wave, which is like the hum of the air conditioner compressor, like everywhere, which, it doesn't bother me, but for, like, the Parisians, that is a very foreign and, like, undesirable outcome.

14:10Ryan Knutson:In Paris, an air conditioner can't produce more than five decibels during the day and three decibels at night. If you're wondering how loud that is, it's about the sound of a whisper.

14:24Five decibels and three decibels, that is very, very quiet.

14:27Ryan Knutson:Yeah, that's got to restrict, like, every—what AC unit operates more quietly than that? Well, that's the thing is that with those rules, you pretty much have to install some kind of like soundproofing over your AC to comply with the rules. Another thing you can do that a lot of people do is put the outside unit on the roof. And that way, the noise escapes a little bit better. Like if you put it in a courtyard, it does tend to reverberate off the stone walls of the courtyard. And so that can be particularly problematic. But still, yeah, it is very hard to install an air conditioner in a Paris apartment.

15:04It can take years.

15:06Ryan Knutson:The noise issue is so common that there's a guy in Paris who calls himself the noise lawyer. He's worked more than 100 of these cases. So that's Christophe Sanson. He makes a living off of representing either neighbors who are trying to stop tenants from installing air conditioning or representing people who are trying to install air conditioning and are fighting their neighbors. And yeah, he's got hundreds of cases in this line of work. And, you know, since the temperatures have been going up in recent years, he's had a sharp increase in the number of legal disputes involving air conditioning.

15:43Ryan Knutson:The noise lawyer's perspective is basically that Paris is dense, the noise laws are strict, the temperatures are warming, and residents are going to have to find ways to compromise. It's not like Paris is a quiet city. I mean, for God's sakes, like, I have an incredibly yappy dog. who lives upstairs from me. And like, you know, it's like way louder than it, like the faint buzz of air conditioning. But that's the law. Paris has taken some measures to try and offset the summer heat. The city's planted more trees, which can help keep the streets cooler. It's installing AC in at least one room in many schools.

16:17Ryan Knutson:And it's also opened up rivers to the public for swimming. And Matt says that the French people have ways of coping. A lot of people have those little fans. Everybody has like different strategies. Some people have been, you know, like sleeping with like a wet towel over them, like a cold wet towel if they can get the water cold enough. You know, I've heard stories of people like spending the day in supermarkets, which are air conditioned. Just lingering by the B file. Yeah, exactly. There's actually a freezer section. There's a frozen food chain, which French people love, called Picard. and yeah like I know people who have been hanging out in Picard because it's like extra cold and you know that's what they do is like keep things cool but you know even in the supermarkets in France like it's not as cool as as like a supermarket in the United States.

17:09Those measures are not as effective as air conditioning.

17:15Ryan Knutson:You can swim in the afternoon and cool off a bit, but come 10 o 'clock at night, if it's 90 degrees in your apartment, that's not going to help. Yeah, this latest heat wave was the first time I ever felt like, you know, we absolutely needed air conditioning going forward. And so, yeah, I did get a portable air conditioner, which is, unfortunately, they're just not that effective. Like, a real air conditioner would have been nice, but, like, that's not an option in my building right now. Climate scientists estimate that in the next decade, Europe could face summers with temperatures as high as 50 degrees Celsius or 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

17:52That is a situation where, like, you know, the city does not become livable during the summer without air conditioning. So, like, I think they're not quite grasping the gravity and, like, the magnitude of the problem that Europe is going to be facing.

18:08Ryan Knutson:But either way, like, this is a problem that the continent is going to have to continue facing. Absolutely. Europe has already warmed faster than any other continent. That goes from just being kind of sweaty and uncomfortable to, like, actually dangerous for, you know, significant portions of the population if you don't have air conditioning. But I do not think they're ever going to go the whole hog, like, you know, Americans, just the force of American air conditioning, I think, will never catch on here.

18:51Ryan Knutson:That's all for today. Tuesday, July 7th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. Stay cool out there.