What the New AC Culture War Is Really About

This summer, the transatlantic culture war has fixated on an unlikely flash point: air-conditioning.Last weekend, I arrived in Paris at the beginning of the heat wave, or canicule, that has stifled the country and much of Europe. Temperatures in France have soared to record-breaking highs, reaching nearly 112 degrees Fahrenheit in certain parts of the country. Several young children have died in parked vehicles, and the French government reported earlier this week that dozens of people have drowned in waterways while seeking relief from the heat. Many more have been hospitalized. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 175,000 people die from heat-related causes each year across Europe. Although such tallies are imperfect, there is legitimate concern that this summer could be particularly lethal.Some commentators in the United States have taken the opportunity to lecture Europeans, and perhaps even indulge in a little schadenfreude. “Just install the goddamn fucking AC and save your grandma’s life, Euro friends!” the popular economics writer Noah Smith posted on X. “I asked Claude about the air conditioning debate in Europe, and it really didn’t pull any punches,” Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, wrote in a viral post. The AI model told Collison that the “elaborate discourse” used to justify the scarcity of AC in Europe “is largely a way of processing the psychological discomfort of admitting that the American approach to summer was correct all along.” Elon Musk reposted the sentiment, calling it a “banger.”Plenty of Americans seem scandalized that more Western Europeans don’t embrace the technological miracle of AC. But the disagreement ultimately has less to do with objective criteria—such as the effects of climate change in Europe, which is warming twice as fast as the global average—than subjective questions about what constitutes an acceptable level of physical suffering and sacrifice. As someone who splits his time between the United States