The EU’s moral crusade against aircon is forcing you to bake in your home

For the past week, much of Europe sweltered in an usual May heatwave. Of course, for the European elite, the cause was obvious – climate change – and the solution just as obvious – double down on virtue-signalling environmentalist policies such as ensuring that plastic bottle caps cannot be removed.

But if climate change can explain the unusual heat, it does not explain the fact that Europeans must sweat in their beds. As the rest of the world – and much of Eastern and Southern Europe – knows, you can evade the consequences of high heat by simply running an air-conditioner. Yet such words are akin to sacrilege in the circles of EU politician – especially in Western Europe. Air-conditioning is for bovine Americans, it is bad for the environment, and, in the favoured trope of the French media, causes ‘choc thermique’, an appellation d’origine protégée disease only found in bougie regions of France.

Cooling has become a moral question. Heating is not treated this way. Nobody thinks the elderly woman warming her flat in January is guilty of climatic decadence. Yet the same woman trying to cool her bedroom in July is invited to contemplate energy sobriety.

This is an increasingly dangerous moral prejudice: In summer 2024, an estimated 62,775 Europeans died from heat-related causes.

But what is often overlooked is that this is not just a prejudice, it is, pardon the pun, baked into EU and national policy.

One of the main culprits is the EU Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings. This specifically identifies air-conditioning as a problem, stating that it creates “considerable problems at peak load times, increasing the cost of electricity and disrupting the energy balance”. To deal with the “problem” of air-conditioning, the directive demands that builders invest in “passive cooling” instead (things such as shutters, blinds, airflow). The problem is immediate and obvious: “Passive cooling” is in many cases only a stop-gap solution and cannot bring temperatures down in periods of sustained heat.

At the same time as regulating against the installation of air-conditioning, the official organs of the EU wage a disinformation campaign to make it morally illegitimate. The European Environment Agency very much set the tone for years of media reporting by designating air-conditioning a “social and just transition issue” and and blaming people for using air-conditioning because it “can prevent people from becoming accustomed to natural heat”.

The EU’s war on air-conditioning is the most obvious cause of unnecessary heat. But the way the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive has influenced the design of buildings is probably just as important. By building new homes (and retrofitting existing ones) with insulation, heat recovery systems, extensive large glazing and other heat-retaining technologies, EU and national legislation has created a class of buildings that simply cannot be effectively cooled in the summer months. This could be called a “winter efficiency trap”, where demands to make winter heating as cheap as possible, especially in new buildings, have resulted in homes that are incredibly efficient in the winter but heat uncontrollably in the summer. Often the only consideration given to cooling is the ability to open windows, and in cities this might mean noise, crime or pollution.

Anyone who has bought or rented a property will have encountered the EU-mandated Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) regime. These ratings, of the same breed as the ugly stickers which plaster any new electronics device, advise renters and buyers of the energy requirements of the property they are considering. The EPC regime has widely influenced the housing market across the continent. Not only have some governments made certain ratings mandatory, but the market-effect of trumpeting energy costs has significantly changed consumer and builder behaviour. But the EPC regime exclusively focuses on energy use, cost, and greenhouse gas emissions, and avoids consideration of how buildings may warm in the summer. Builders and landlords are incentivised to bring total winter warming costs down without any consideration for the effect on heat levels in the summer. Indeed, installing an air-conditioning unit would negatively impact the EPC rating even if it was strictly necessary for avoiding intolerable and unhealthy heat during warm periods.

Egged on by these regulations, and a general attitude of hostile regulations to those who wish to build or improve housing, many European countries throw up even more barriers to those who wish to cool their houses. In many Western European countries, attempts to install air-conditioning, or even the EU-approved external shutters, can be drowned in a regulatory tsunami of planning rules, environmental permits, noise limits, heritage controls, landlord consent and co-ownership approval.

The net effect of this mix of cultural suspicion and heavy-handed regulation is that the EU is an international outlier when it comes to air-conditioning. But more important than international comparisons is the simple fact of quality-of-life. Excessive warmth is uncomfortable, unhealthy and restricting.

Ultimately, this is another example of green austerity: The living standards of ordinary Europeans are sacrificed to meet sustainability targets. Of course, in many buildings, the effect of a few warm nights is not the end of the world. But couple the absence of air-conditioning with recycling mandates, face-scraping bottle caps, vehicle levies, self-dissolving paper straws, plastic-bag charges, and deposit-return schemes and the cumulative toll of these climate absolutions is is simply depressing. Heaped upon these daily indignities are even more profound sacrifices we are forced to make at the altar of environmentalism: Unaffordable energy bills, businesses moving away, and mandatory home renovations.

The EU loves to talk about climate adaptation – so let us do just that. The best adaptation to heat is cooling. For Europe, it is high time to unshackle the air-conditioner.

Jacob Reynolds, Head of Policy MCC Brussels the think tank