No AC? It’s a European Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand | American Enterprise Institute
Another summer, another season of heat-death disaster for Europe.
We’re not even finished with July, but already 2026 heatwaves have claimed a five-figure European death toll.
According to EuroMoMo (a mortality monitoring project supported by WHO), health authorities in Europe reported over 10,000 ‘excess deaths’ during June alone—most of them senior citizens who succumbed to extreme heat. June’s temperatures also took younger lives; in France, according to the country’s Minister of Sports and Youth, over 90 drowned while trying to cool off.
Yet that current Euro-tally of heat-related deaths is likely an underestimate. Modeled real-time results from an Indiana University study suggest Europe’s true heatwave death count was actually over 20,000—and that’s just for June 22-28.
For the full summer of 2024, according to corresponding statistical modeling by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), heatwaves were responsible for nearly 63,000 “attributed deaths” in 32 European countries—and for an average of 60,000 such deaths per summer for 2022 through 2024.
Summer heat simply doesn’t decimate Americans this way. In the US, according to CDC death-certificate data, heat-related deaths averaged just under 2,200 annually for 2022-24. Even using statistical models to scale up for the undercounted burden, America’s “attributed” excess heat deaths would be only a fraction of Europe’s.
So what is Europe’s problem? Two words: air conditioning. (Or rather, the lack of it.)
Compelling charts by the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch underscore the contrast: after outdoor temperatures get above 80°F (around, say, 25°C), excess deaths spike brutally higher in European cities than in their US counterparts.
Over the postwar era, AC has gradually come to rule American homes. Between 1955 and 2025, according to Census Bureau and Energy Department figures, the share of US residences with any air conditioning steadily powered upward, from under 2 to 90 percent today. Central air conditioning—all-home duct cooling, a US innovation from the 1960s still essentially unknown in Europe—now climatizes two-thirds of American homes.
Against this American mirror, European countries are decades—often generations—behind. Greece, Europe’s ostensible frontrunner, has a level of home air-con coverage comparable to America’s at the beginning of the 21st Century. Everywhere else in Europe, AC availability looks to be at pre-Reagan levels. France is akin to America in 1965. Germany is (at best) like America circa 1963, when JFK was president. British AC saturation today tracks with America’s in 1956, at the time of the Suez Crisis.
But plentiful air-conditioning isn’t just an American “excess.” All around the world, thanks to technology and prosperity, home AC is on the way in—except, apparently, in Europe. The chart below on the availability of residential air conditioning in OECD countries makes the point.
Some Western countries have even higher residential AC coverage than the US—Israel and Japan among them. South Korea is now approaching total residential AC coverage (98 percent). Temperate New Zealand beats all Euro-competitors (save Greece). Even in Canada, 40 percent of whose territory is considered Arctic, fully two-thirds of homes have AC these days—far more than in Mediterranean Italy (56 percent), Spain (41 percent), or France (24 percent).
So the striking lack of AC nowadays in affluent modern Europe looks very much like some sort of stubborn choice. We get a sense of just how extreme Europe’s AC-exceptionalism may be these days with a simple statistical analysis.
The chart below “predicts” residential AC penetration in OECD today using just two factors: per capita income, and whether or not a country is European. Per capita income turns out to make little difference (no surprise: our analysis leaves out all of the poor world.) But the Europe thing matters, big time. All else equal, an OECD country’s residential AC availability drops by almost 50 percentage points if it happens to be European.
Put another way: by the patterns in the chart below, a country with America’s present income level would have air-conditioning in fewer than half its homes today if it were on a “European” schedule. With “European” norms, indeed, a country as rich as the US today would have the same limited AC coverage the US reported over half a century ago.
Air conditioning is a quality of life issue—that is why peoples all around the world (apart from Europe) reveal their preference for it.
But it is also a public health issue.
Very rough calculations suggest Europe could pay for the energy needed to reach US home AC prevalence for under $15 billion a year: less than a tenth of one percent of GDP.
As a pure public health intervention, the cost-per-life-saved calculus here might merit consideration. Euro-authorities seem to have their own dogged reasoning for severely restricting their region’s AC. But while they are out “saving the planet,” saving a few more Europeans might be worthwhile, too.
