Cool Comfort Denied: Europe’s War on Air Conditioning

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In Camden, North London, a homeowner did something that would strike most of the people in the world as entirely unremarkable: he fitted two air conditioning units to the rear of his flat so that his family might sleep more comfortably through a spell of hot weather. Camden Council’s planning enforcement officers thought otherwise. They ordered the units “permanently removed”, ruling that the installation breached the borough’s “cooling hierarchy” policy, and advised the resident to rely instead on open windows and balcony doors. This was no isolated bureaucratic misfire. It happened during a stretch of hot, dry weather of the sort Britain has seen periodically for decades, one that produced some locally exceptional readings elsewhere on the Continent but nothing that anyone who sweated through the summers of 1976 or 2003 would call unprecedented.

What was unusual was the accompanying body count. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Met Office announced more than 2,700 estimated deaths across England and Wales attributable to the May and June heat, a figure duly repeated across the press as established fact.

As my colleague Ben Pile points out, it was nothing of the sort. The 2,700 figure was not a count of bodies but the output of a statistical model estimating how many deaths would statistically not have occurred at lower temperatures – a hypothesis presented to the public as an observed fact. Britain’s own official mortality statistics show that cold weather kills roughly four times as many people every year as heat does, a detail rarely mentioned by the same commentators demanding ever more urgent climate action. None of this should surprise readers familiar with the modelling habits of Britain’s climate establishment: last year’s equally confident predictions of a heatwave death spike were followed by mortality data that, if anything, declined through the following weeks.

The narrower point worth making is about consumer choice. The same institutions that tout estimated heat deaths to justify accelerating Net Zero are also among the loudest defenders of the planning regime that blocks the one technology already proven, unambiguously, to reduce heat mortality wherever it has been allowed to spread: the ordinary air conditioner. One might expect a policy establishment that spends every summer touting heat-mortality estimates to embrace, without hesitation, that remedy. Instead, Britain and the European Union have spent the better part of two decades constructing precisely the opposite – a regulatory architecture engineered to make it as difficult as possible for ordinary households to own, install and run an air conditioner. This is the energy-efficiency mindset carried to its logical, and thoroughly illogical, conclusion.