1/ A thread about the class dynamics of air-conditioning in Europe. I believe attitudes toward air-conditioning are class markers in many European countries. Air-conditioning is seen as prototypically American, and that's important.
2/ I have lived in Germany for two decades and have observed the pro-A/C contingent here go from total defeat to now being on the verge of victory. The reason is normies. I remember visiting a local grocery store in my neighborhood just after it installed air-conditioning.
3/ This was 2016. You'd see dozens of people enter the store from the hot sticky weather outside and visibly transform, chattering with surprise and pleasure. Of course, people spent 3x as much time and 1.5 times as much money in that store to get relief from sticky heat.
4/ After this experience, they realize the only way to achieve truly comfortable temperature *and humidity* on a hot summer day is air-conditioning. They save up €250 and buy a portable "monoblock" unit for their apartment. Loud and inefficient but gets the job done.
5/ But these are ordinary middle- and working-class Germans, who are just as pragmatic as people anywhere. The urban haute bourgeoisie -- bureaucrats, public media executives, NGO employees, humanities grads, journalists, professors, lawyers, judges, etc. -- are the holdouts.
6/ First of all, *every one* of these people has a story about visiting the USA and nearly freezing to death in an over air-conditioned store or office. Every. Damn. One. I can predict exactly when they will wheel out this traumatic tale, I just let it unfold naturally.
7/ This anecdote conveys two pieces of status-related information. First: "I can afford to travel overseas." Second: "Americans are ignorant and wasteful." To these people, A/C is the ultimate American solution to a problem. Instead of accepting nature as it is, Americans
8/ use expensive, wasteful technology to artificially change the environment to fit their fat, lazy lifestyles. They insist on defying and conquering nature, not "cooperating" with her. And they don't care if they cook the planet while they do so. I'd be lying if I said
9/ this argument was 100% bogus, there's certainly some truth to it. But the European urban haute bourgeoisie turns it into a rigid ideological aversion to any form of air-conditioning. They wear understated linen clothes, their children play with wooden toys, and they
10/ buy organic food and "sustainable" everything. There's certainly no way in hell they're going to put a loud, energy-hogging piece of *American* technology into their quaint high-ceilinged apartment in a 140-year-old building. Which is fine, except for one fact:
11/ These people regard these decisions not just as their personal lifestyle choices, but rather as a *model for all of society*. They regard themselves as a revolutionary vanguard of advanced ecological consciousness which must aid the less enlightened to reduce their carbon
12/ footprints. And these people *run German society*. They dominate in public broadcasting and urban planning circles. Just a few weeks ago, on the main evening news show, which is watched by millions, a journalist doing a feature on a heat wave mentioned air-conditioning
13/ only to have the studio moderator immediately break in and say "Yes but air-conditioning is a climate-killer" and the remote journalists nodded in agreement, as if this were universally accepted self-evident truth. Which, among the circles *they frequent*, it is.
14/ Urban planners and people who create construction codes in Germany are also brigadiers in the anti-A/C jihad. All across Europe and the UK, urban planners and bureaucrats and officials are preparing "heat reduction" plans to cope with increasingly frequent European heatwaves.
15/ As often as not, these reports never even mention air-conditioning. They talk about "cooling centers", "misting stations", "cooling vests", sunshades, blinds, louvers, more trees, more parks, complicated evaporation cooling systems, adjusted work rules, etc.
16/ But never once do they even mention air-conditioning, even when addressing "vulnerable populations" such as schoolchildren or hospital patients or seniors. It's almost as if these planning bureaucrats take a perverse pride in ignoring the elephant in the room.
17/ And the irony is that sustaining all of these complex, inadequate solutions during long heatwaves is more expensive and inefficient than just installing A/C. Which is safer and cheaper: Rounding up all 85 residents of a nursing home and transporting them
18/ to a makeshift "cooling center" where they'll be sprayed with mist in front of fans -- or just putting an air-con unit in each resident's room? The answer is obvious to a pragmatic normie, but is unacceptable to a "sustainability"-obsessed member of the laptop class.
19/ Which is why it's pretty common on sweltering days to hear Germans complain about the "goddamn 'eco-this' 'organic-that' pencil pushers" who continue to force them to sweat for hours in overheated hospitals, classrooms, and offices.
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