From Phoenix to Philadelphia, Americans intuitively understand what to do when temperatures rise above 100 degrees Fahrenheit: stay inside where it’s cool and pray the air conditioning holds out. In Europe, authorities are practicing the opposite. Around midday on Friday, staff working in the European Commission’s headquarters building received a text notice: “Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”

The “urgent” alert applied to the Berlaymont building, which houses roughly 3,000 staff, 26 commissioners, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen herself.

Western Europe is currently under a heat dome that, in fairness, is causing dangerous heat conditions, especially in France. One French town saw temperatures reach 44.3 C (111.7 F), while Parisian temperatures hit 40.9 C (105.6 F). However, most places saw highs in the 90s, so these local extremes might be influenced by local urban conditions.

Historically speaking, both British and continental Europeans have not taken to air conditioning, with only about 20% of continental households having an A/C unit.

Lack of reliance on A/C is not inherently a problem. It all depends on one’s climate, and some alternative methods of cooling can work even better. For example, I lived for a year in the California desert, where daytime temperatures routinely reached the 90s, while nighttime temperatures reached the 50s. My townhouse was equipped with a “home fan” on the roof; when I got home from school in the temperate evening air, I simply opened the downstairs windows, turned on the fan, and all the air in the house was replaced in under five minutes.

In similar “Mediterranean” climates, home designs like the Roman villa can use airflow techniques to achieve comfort without air conditioning. Of course, no home designs can counteract the sultry, stifling summer heat of the American south. For that, air conditioning is not optional. Western Europe’s climate has historically been wet and cool (comparable to, say, Seattle), so its lack of A/C is usually a non-issue. But, in recent years, summer heatwaves have thrown Europe’s A/C aversion into the news.

Lack of reliance on A/C is not inherently a problem, but it becomes a problem when government policies stubbornly reject the commonsense technology for a utopian ideological scheme. That is the unfortunate situation in which Western Europe now finds itself.

The European Climate Law requires the European Union to achieve “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” by 2050. This far-fetched objective requires both massive investment in “renewable” energy (which often has its own carbon cost) as well as absolute cuts to the total energy expended. As the EU itself explains it, “all parts of society and economic sectors will play a role.”

This last statement is a nice way of saying that, in addition to making energy and all sorts of goods more expensive, European governments now bully their subjects into forgoing simple conveniences like air conditioning, as these conveniences present a formidable obstacle to achieving the region’s arbitrary emissions goals.

For instance, the French ecological transition agency (feel free to gape dumbfounded at the concept) has issued guidance that A/C should only be used for the elderly, chronically ill, or pregnant, and that even these people should cool only one room in their house to 79 degrees Fahrenheit, as The Wall Street Journal translated. For everyone else, they advised: wet your face and arms multiple times a day, wear a hat, drink water, eat cold soup to stay hydrated, cover windows, avoid using heat-generating appliances like computers. Many of these are common sense, but none replaces air conditioning.

This self-inflicted pain is all for “the long-term goal set by the Paris Agreement — holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.” Not that human emissions have much control over global temperature fluctuations, but America’s exit from the Paris pact looks even wiser in hindsight.

Europe has made their anti-air conditioning stance into something of a moral issue, Flemish philosopher Maarten Boudry argues. “The deeper cause is an ideological “less is more” sensibility, more potent in Europe than anywhere else, which frames artificial cooling as a decadent indulgence — something for profligate Yankees with oversized SUVs and backyard pools,” he said, concluding that Europe’s aversion to air conditioning was a form of “secular penance.”

Penance for what? Apparently, Europe has internalized class- and race-conscious thinking to the point that they feel guilty for their continent’s past success in leaping the technological hurdles of the Industrial Revolution. To compensate for their wealth relative to the rest of the world, Europeans will now suffer needlessly, denying themselves the comfort of modern technological victories their continent once excelled in.

Of course, Europeans are not as rich as they imagine themselves to be. Even comparatively poor Americans are richer than the average European, as demonstrated by the fact that they have access to modern comforts like air conditioning. The reason for this disparity is not some form of discrimination, as university wokesters would assume, but the simple fact that America has not yet stifled economic growth as Europe has.

Indeed, the prevalence of air conditioning is far more of an economic issue than a moral one. Every energy grid can only generate a set amount of electricity at any one time. And every homeowner (and bill-payer) would readily grant that air conditioners use a lot of electricity during “peak hours,” which often corresponds to the hottest time of day.

Energy grids must meet the energy demand, but there are two ways to do so. One is to ask how much energy people will use and then build capacity to meet it. The other approach (the one taken by Europe) is to mandate that people reduce their energy consumption to the predetermined capacity of a too-fragile grid. The former envisions prosperity and ease; the latter enforces scarcity and suffering. The former is always possible with proper planning; the latter plans on eliminating many of the most prevalent and cost-effective methods of energy production.

From time to time, electric grids in America fail, too. This is often due to a combination of poor planning and green policies that favor energy production from wind and solar over that from coal and natural gas. If California (and even Texas) would simply open more natural gas or nuclear power plants, their energy production problems would be largely solved. But Europe has taken the energy-constriction pipeline to its most extreme terminus.

Such policy choices have real-world consequences. France was last seen closing schools rather than cooling the air inside them. Belgium’s national railway canceled many peak-hour services because 20% of its trains have no A/C. In the U.K., supermarket chains have closed their chilled and frozen sections and thrown away spoiled food because they could not keep it cool. The police have also ordered residents to remove A/C units installed in their homes — during the heat wave — to comply with the arbitrary “net-zero” rules.

The air conditioning issue is not simply about comfort. When people get too hot, their brains and bodies stop functioning normally, leading to serious health concerns. It also leads people to extreme measures to cool themselves down. Last week, France recorded 1,000 additional deaths during the heat wave, many of whom drowned while trying to cool themselves down. This continues a trend: in the relatively cool summer of 2023, 47,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes, as did 60,000 in 2022. In a 16-day heatwave from 2003, 80,000 excess deaths were recorded across Europe.

By contrast, in the United States, economist Alan Barreca found a 75% decline in the risk of death on hot days that directly corresponds to the adoption of air conditioning. “The adoption of residential air conditioning explains essentially the entire decline in the temperature-mortality relationship,” he said.

In other words, tens of thousands of Europeans die from heat-related causes every summer, not because of climate change, but because European governments are too stubbornly committed to their anti-climate change agenda to adopt live-saving air conditioning.

This result shows that European governments “have not thought through the apocalyptic climate warnings they have been making for years,” responded National Review’s Andrew Stuttaford. “If they ‘knew’ that much hotter heat waves were coming, they should have first upgraded their grids and built more power stations using proven technology. Instead they chose to spend billions on unreliable ‘renewable’ energy, billions that could have been put to work in an infinitely more productive way.”

But perhaps European elites never much minded the consequences of their policies, as they always intended to exempt themselves. That is the cynical conclusion some Europeans are forming after the European Commission shut off air conditioning on Friday for the lowest seven floors of the Berlaymont building.

In the 13-story building, President von der Leyen and most of her commissioners work on floors eight through 13, meaning they kept their air conditioning, even as the literally lower-level employees lost it. There might be innocent explanations: perhaps the building had two separate A/C systems for its upper and lower halves, and it was judged more necessary to cool the upper half because heat rises.

But some angry employees spilled to the media that it was a “disgrace,” or was “like feudalism” when the elites are literally above the everyday consequences of their policies. At least the Berlaymont building has an air conditioning system; other EC employees work in buildings with no air conditioning at all.

I write these words from my air conditioned office, before returning this evening to my air conditioned home. If you live in America, you are probably reading these words from an air conditioned home, car, bus, train, plane, church, or retailer. Practically every place in America has air conditioning in the year 2026, and we would happily let Europe in on the secret.

On this 250th anniversary of American independence, I’m glad to live in America. If for no other reason, Americans know how to keep it cool.