No, New York Times, AC is not a "short-term fix"

Last month, I was in Berlin during the single hottest day ever recorded in the city: 39.9°C (103.8°F). It was so hot that police vans were literally spraying people on the sidewalk to help them cool off.

Now, being from Dallas, TX—where the hottest day ever recorded was 45°C (113°F)—I’m no stranger to heat waves. But in Germany it was totally different. Almost nobody here has air conditioning—a mere 6% of households. My apartment isn’t air conditioned. My office isn’t air conditioned. By the time I realized how hot the weekend would be, it was too late to get something on Amazon (given the long shipping times), and I had to walk across town in the scorching heat to buy a fan from the electronics shop (€65 for a basic model). I spent most of my weekend parked in front of the fan with a wet towel draped over my shoulders. I slept poorly and got vanishingly little done.

Of course, I was one of the lucky ones. Imagine being a German doctor, forced to work in the heat—yes, if you can believe it, most German hospitals don’t have AC except in a few rooms. (Even some ICUs lack AC.) Imagine being a German teacher, tasked with drilling students on math problems in the sweltering heat. Imagine being an elderly person, living alone, disabled, with no one nearby to check on you.

In case you don’t know, heat is deadly for old people. This is something I learned from experience years ago after someone in my family died in the Texas heat—his car had broken down and he was forced to search for help on foot.

That was an emergency. Meanwhile, in Europe, heat deaths are becoming routine. The WHO estimates that 175,000 Europeans die every year from the heat—that’s more deaths per capita than US gun homicides! Already 5,000 excess deaths were recorded in Germany just during the week of the last heat wave. And these are deaths that can be easily stopped: we have the technology, and it’s called AC. To share just one rough figure, Noah Smith estimates that AC could save 100,000 European lives per year.

Barreca et al. (2016) find that heat deaths in America declined by about 75% after 1960, and that “the diffusion of residential air conditioning explains essentially the entire decline in hot day–related fatalities”. Essentially, wherever AC gets rolled out, heat-related death plunges. Taking Barreca’s estimate and applying it to Europe suggests that as many as 100,000 European lives — 0.013% of the population — could be saved every year if the 80% of European households who don’t have AC were to get it.

In short: kids can’t learn, adults can’t do their jobs, and the elderly are at serious risk of death—so, build more AC!

Open and shut case, right?

Not everyone thinks so. Across Europe and now even parts of North America, environmentalists, journalists, and politicians have been deriding AC as a merely temporary fix, a way of illicitly dodging the “root cause” of rising temperatures—namely, climate change, caused by a rise in greenhouse gases.

I don’t know whether to call this clueless or malevolent. But it ain’t right.

Before I go off on this nonsense, let me emphasize that it’s not just a figment of econ Substack’s imagination. Look at this piece from CNN last month:

But experts warn AC may be a quick reprieve from scorching temperatures but it gobbles up energy, most of which still comes from planet-heating fossil fuels.

Using fossil fuel-powered AC increases planet-heating pollution, which in turn increases temperatures, fueling “a vicious cycle of worsening climate change,” said Radhika Khosla, an associate professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford.

Note the phrase “quick reprieve.” Just a few days later, the New York Times was similarly dismissive:

Everyone agrees something must be done. But not everyone agrees on what that should be.

Increasingly, the answer from right-wing politicians is to focus on a short-term fix that almost everyone agrees is necessary — the installation of air-conditioning units in European homes, schools, public buildings and hospitals.

During intense heat waves, calling for improvement of the sometimes crumbling infrastructure of aging European cities can be an effective way of drawing attention to that problem without saying much about the longer-term, underlying cause: rising greenhouse gas emissions.

There it is: “short-term fix,” though at least they call it “necessary.” (It’s depressingly easy to find further examples.)

If you think this is idle rhetoric, think again. Many European governments are not only discouraging the use of ACs: they will use their monopoly on violence to make you rip them out. In North London, local authorities forced homeowners to remove their AC units for the sake of the “local micro-climate.” Sorry, only permanent solutions allowed!

But dismissing AC as a mere “short-term fix” is deeply confused, for two simple reasons.

First, AC is a permanent solution to a legitimate problem. The problem is that people are too hot. AC cools them down, by cooling the rooms where they spend most of their time. True, AC uses electricity, which can mean more greenhouse gas emissions. But:

• We shouldn’t ban things just because they use electricity—otherwise we’d have to ban lights, phones, laptops, fridges, ovens, vacuums, and laundry machines.

• We can always just create more green energy by investing in solar, wind, and nuclear power infrastructure.

In other words, if you want a permanent solution, you want everyone to have AC powered by green energy.

Second, cutting emissions doesn’t actually solve the problem. To repeat, the problem at issue is that people are already too hot. If we cut greenhouse gas emissions, we will stop raising the equilibrium temperature of the planet, which is obviously good for all the obvious reasons. But the CO₂ in the air won’t just magically disappear as a reward for our virtue. Cutting emissions doesn’t reverse global warming.1 It won’t make even the slighest dent in the 175,000 annual excess deaths. Yes, it will prevent the problem from getting worse, but that’s a ridiculously low place to set the bar for our climate policies. Why should anyone tolerate the status quo of widespread preventable suffering?

Part of the confusion may be due to blindness: some people just refuse to see the suffering of ordinary people, caused by excess heat, as a problem worth solving.

But I also suspect that the AC-haters are falling prey to a philosophical error I like to call the root cause fallacy—the baseless assumption that every problem should only be solved at the deepest metaphysical level.

Sometimes, of course, it’s smart to go after root causes. Getting your cavity filled is better than taking ibuprofen. Calling a plumber to fix your leaky ceiling is better than putting out a bucket. But there are also many cases where targeting the root cause is prohibitively costly. James Madison argued that we shouldn’t try to remove the root causes of “factions” in democracy, because that would require either abolishing basic liberties (a remedy “worse than the disease”) or imposing ideological conformity (an “impracticable” fantasy). Other times, the root cause of a problem simply has no solution. There is no way to “solve the problem” that each of us is mortal, for example, but we should still be grateful for “short-term fixes” like medicine and surgery.2

In the case of Europe’s heat waves, I enthusiastically agree that the root cause is climate change. I also agree that part of the solution should be big investments in green energy, which will mitigate warming over the next decades.

But when hospitals are heating up, schools are shutting down, and elderly people are dying en masse, you can’t seriously tell me that “ensure the world is only slightly hotter by 2050” counts as an adequate solution. People’s basic interests are at stake here! If your political team stands for stripping out ACs, while your opponents promise ACs for everyone, you are setting yourself up for an electoral shellacking.

I’ll end with a quiz about France, where, by the way, only 7% of schools have AC. Here are some quotes from a certain French politician:

It is high time that France rolled out a major air conditioning equipment plan.

It is absurd to have people die because of the heat.

It’s crazy to tell families to stop working from one day to the next because schools can’t take our kids anymore, while telling them to go to the local movie theater, which is air-conditioned.

And here are quotes from the other side of the spectrum:

Individual air conditioning is a scourge.

We mustn’t do it. Installing air conditioning everywhere means causing more harm.

If our only answer is air conditioning everywhere, then we will aggravate the situation!

Which party do you think is doing a better job of showing that they care about the material interests of French voters?

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And yes, those first quotes are from the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, while the latter quotes are from the French Socialists, France Unbowed, and the Ecologists (France’s Green Party). But let me emphasize that neither side here is a monolith, and the fate of the debate is hardly a matter of inflexible destiny. Here is Marine Tondelier, another Ecologist, when pressed about AC:

I’ve never been against air conditioning. We’ve always said that the priority should be combating climate change, and that when that isn’t enough, since inaction is the inevitable consequence, we have to adapt, and that in certain areas, for certain populations, air conditioning has become essential. That’s always been my position.

“We have to adapt” is—excuse me—a damn fine message for 2026. Let’s hope others wise up before it’s too late.