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Wednesday Morning Rant

Heat

It's summertime and that means - you might want to sit down for this - it gets hot. Shocking, I know. This year, as in many prior years, Western Europe has had a spate of hot weather. This seems to happen most years. Europe gets hot, stuff shuts down, people die and then things return to normal. This year, it was early, and various outfits estimate that it caused thousands of deaths - a bunch of them, of course, directly attributable to Muh Climate Change.

As easy as it would be to write it off as the annual exercise in European absurdity and weakness, that would obscure an underlying issue. Why does this happen to Europe? Why are heat waves in the US notable but not a nightmare that suspends public life and results in thousands of deaths (if estimates are to be believed)? Two words: air conditioning. We have it, they don't. But why don't they have it?

Air conditioning is a bone of contention in Europe. Some people want it and some people don't, as is right and proper. Different strokes for different folks and all that. It becomes interesting when some people want it, but can't get it because somebody else thought it would be better if it was unavailable. Sometimes, this is due to Muh Climate Change. Britain, for example, has banned R410a refrigerant for small systems (we are following them), which has implications for cost but not availability. Britain also requires government permission to install air conditioning in commercial buildings.

But the real issue lurks beneath the surface. It isn't about refrigerants or health and safety or the always convenient "climate change." It's about energy and anipathy:

Europeans look with disdain at overcooled US buildings, kept to near meat-locker temperatures, where a blast of cold air can shoot across city sidewalks as people come and go, and extended indoor appointments necessitate a sweater even in the height of summer.

Air conditioning is what those unsophisticated Americans do! Europeans swelter like civilized people. That's one aspect, but that also isn't policy. People turning their noses up at air conditioning because of America hatred isn't a sufficient explanation, especially when it's hot out and people flock to stores to buy air conditioners. The same article, though, provides the real reasons:

During Europe's heatwave in July, Floriana Peroni's vintage clothing store had to close for a week.

A truck of rented generators blocked her door as they fed power to the central Roman neighbourhood hit by a blackout as temperatures surged. The main culprit: air conditioning.

The period - in which temperatures hit 40C - coincided with peak electricity use that came close to Italy’s all-time high, hitting a peak load of more than 59 gigawatts on 19 July. That neared a record set in July 2015.

Intensive electricity use knocked out the network not only near the central Campo de Fiori neighbourhood, where Peroni operates her shop, but elsewhere in the Italian capital.

Demand in that second July week surged 30 per cent, correlating to a heatwave that had persisted already for weeks, according to the capital’s electricity company ARETI.

Their grids aren't built for air conditioning demand, and they probably can't accommodate it due, at least in part, to insane environment regulations. So what to do? Outright bans are possible, but cause political trouble when people like Marine Le Pen call for installing air conditioning in schools and hospitals, not restricting it. Bans are politically tricky, and not as desirable as scare tactics. - and Fance in particular seems to love scare tactics:

French authorities pushed back. Energy minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher said large-scale air conditioning would heat up streets with the machines' exhaust, making heat waves worse. "It's a bad solution," she told reporters during the last heat wave, flanked by the perspiring prime minister, François Bayrou . "We should air-condition for vulnerable people to give them a break, but on the other hand we shouldn't do it everywhere."

Ah, so control access to air conditioning to avoid heating up the cities during heat waves. There has been some research that indicates that large-scale air conditioning can increase outdoor temperature - by a couple of degrees centigrade under ideal conditions. Even if true, this is a preposterous reason to restrict air conditioning given that at worst it's a rounding error on urban heat islands. But then, of course, there's the real scare tactic - that air conditioning will kill you:

In France, media outlets often warn that cooling a room to more than 15 degrees Fahrenheit below the outside temperature can cause something called "thermal shock," resulting in nausea, loss of consciousness and even respiratory arrest.

If this were true, much of the American population would die every year - yet they say it with straight faces. Eeeeeeeevil American-style air conditioning will kill you and broil the city. Best to let your betters in government ration it.

But whatever the rationalization, the real problems are an inadequate energy grid, ruinous regulations that restrict availability while increasing costs and cultural objections. Hot weather reduces the last of these, so the governments have to step in and ramp up artificial constraints, with a healthy dose of fear to sell it to their publics. It is the European Way.

So as usual, continue to reject the "we ought to be more like Europe" argument whenever it surfaces. At least we don't have die-offs when it gets above a hundred degrees.