European Pols Demand People Suffer for the Planet
Europe’s heatwave has its collective masses suffering under the sweltering conditions. The Wall Street Journal editorialized, “But this makes it all the stranger that governments prefer that their citizens sweat it out rather than use the modern invention known as air conditioning.”
The French government believes AC is only appropriate for the sick and elderly. Everybody should, “Wet your body (at least your face and forearms) several times a day.” Wear a hat outside. Drink more water and try cold soups and other “water-rich foods to help you stay hydrated.”
“Dim the electric lights” and cover the windows in your home, and avoid using appliances like a computer or a hair dryer that could generate heat. All this in the interest of saving the planet. “AC uses too much energy and contributes to climate change.”
America, thankfully, as I write, on a computer, while it’s 106 degrees outside here in Las Vegas choses to enjoy the benefits provided by Willis Haviland Carrier, the “father of air conditioning”. In a lecture at the 2006 Mises U, I made the point, “Willis Haviland Carrier made a huge difference in many peoples’ lives, people that have never heard of him. Can you imagine Mises University in August in Auburn without it? Would millions of people be moving to Phoenix and Las Vegas without air conditioning?”
Of course the downside is Washington DC stays in business all year around. “The installation of air conditioning in the 1930s did more, I believe, than cool the Capitol,” reminisced Rep. Joseph W. Martin, a Massachusetts Republican, in 1960, “it prolonged the sessions.” “Would American statism have come full flower in a non-air-conditioned capital city? Always, in technology, there are debits and credits,” wrote Jim Grant in 1999.
Grant, writing during the .com bubble, “To those who inhabit the hazy, hot and humid portions of the physical world, the Internet will never seem so seminal an invention as the low-tech room air conditioner. Visionaries may claim that the ’net will do nothing less than create new industries, refashion old ones, enhance productivity and rewrite the script of social, economic and political life the world over. Air conditioning has done all that, and more. Yet it has so far created no financial Garden of Eden, and we think we know the reason.”
Grant cited Raymond Arsenault’s essay entitled “The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture” (first published in 1984 in The Journal of Southern History), “The so-called ‘air-conditioning revolution’. . . was actually an evolution—a long, slow, uneven process stretching over seven decades.”
Grant summarizes, “A Brooklyn lithography plant was the first recipient of the Carrier apparatus, in 1902. Sales to a wide variety of industrial customers followed. But the so-called comfort market went uninvaded until the successful commercialization of centrifugal refrigeration, in 1922. When, on Memorial Day in 1925 Carrier successfully cooled the patrons of the Rivoli Theater, New York, a new day dawned. Yet almost 30 years would have to pass before the residential air conditioning market came into its own. Carrier himself wouldn’t live to see it.”
Carrier would not live to see massive productivity increases during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson eras. The first UNIVAC computer arrived in 1951, the Boeing Dash 80 (prototype of the 707 jetliner) debuted in 1954, interstate highway system legislation was signed by President Eisenhower in 1956 and the Xerox 914 copier came on the market in 1960. “And it was in the fabulous ’50s that residential air conditioning became a fixture,” Grant wrote.
Meanwhile, in 2026, Europeans suffer. A 67-year old woman told French paper Le Parisien that she takes three or four showers a day to cool down from the 90 degree home temperature. She wets the exterior of her home with a garden hose. “I’ve even fallen over due to dizziness because I was too hot,” she said.
Today’s bubble is Artificial Intelligence (AI). According to CoPilot, “AI enhances productivity, decision-making, and innovation while reducing human error and enabling automation across industries.
Okay, but I’ll take air conditioning first.
