The right to cool: who will regulate cooling technologies in the coming century?

To understand how climate policy is set to change, one need only look at a door that has been torn from its hinges at a Lidl supermarket in Nanterre. On a morning when temperatures exceeded forty degrees, a crowd gathered to snap up the last portable air conditioners; in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, power cuts during heatwaves have sparked protests from people who could not even switch on a fan. Coolness is no longer a matter of comfort. It has become a matter of public order, consensus, equality and development.

Air conditioning has always had a morally dubious reputation: the symbol of the over-air-conditioned office and the consumer who insists on living at twenty-two degrees whilst the planet burns. But the figures tell a less convenient story. Heat is the deadliest extreme weather event: between 2000 and 2019, it is estimated to have caused nearly 489,000 deaths per year. Air conditioning, in the early 2020s, is estimated to have prevented around 190,000 of these deaths among the over-65s alone. In the United States, it has helped reduce the risk of dying on very hot days by around 75 per cent. In short, air conditioning is not the enemy of humanity: it is often what prevents people from dying of heatstroke.

This is where the geopolitics of cooling begins. Marine Le Pen calls for more air-conditioning units in schools and hospitals; Jean-Luc Mélenchon retorts that ‘air-conditioning everywhere’ would ultimately heat the planet up even further. In the United States, all it takes is a call for thermostats to be set at twenty-six degrees – to prevent the grid from collapsing – for the right to turn the temperature in people’s homes into a battle for freedom. Populism has grasped something that a section of the environmental movement struggles to accept: when the heat comes into the home, the voter doesn’t want a lecture about 2050. They want to know if they’ll be able to sleep tonight.

Europe is the place where this contradiction is most evident. It is home to less than ten per cent of the world’s population, yet accounts for 36 per cent of heat-related deaths. It is the continent warming fastest, and just 23 per cent of households have air conditioning. For years, we have treated adaptation as a moral concession. This is a mistake. Reducing emissions serves to avert a worse future; cooling hospitals, schools and homes serves to ensure that the present is not sacrificed.

In poorer countries, the problem is even more acute. Over 80 per cent of the world’s population regularly experiences temperatures that would require cooling systems, but only 40 per cent have access to them. In India, 50 million units were installed between 2019 and 2024, and a further 130–150 million could be added over the next decade. The poorest people rent them, sometimes going into debt, and spend up to 8 per cent of their income on the electricity needed to run them. Climate inequality is the paradox of those who pay more to get less cooling.

The sensible response is not to ban air conditioning, but to make it more efficient and accessible. We need well-insulated buildings, better appliances, energy storage, abundant electricity generation and less harmful refrigerants. And we need to shake off the mindset that views any form of adaptation as a fault. The market is already doing this: Chinese exports of air conditioners to the European Union have risen by 43 per cent in a year. Whilst the West debates whether it is ethically acceptable to switch on the air conditioning, Beijing is preparing to sell it to them.

The real climate issue is not choosing between the planet and the air conditioner. It is deciding who will have access to cooling, using what energy, with what technologies, and under whose control. In the century of heat, freedom will also be measured in degrees. A country unable to guarantee electricity and cooling for its citizens will not only be hotter: it will be poorer, more unstable and less free. The climate transition, therefore, cannot simply be a policy of sacrifice: it must be a policy of power. Whoever controls the technologies of cooling, energy and building efficiency will control a decisive part of the economy of the future. It would be a mistake to allow the demand for cooling to become a new source of geopolitical dependence. The climate will not ask for permission before it changes, but politics can still decide whether to shape that change or simply endure it. In the warmer world that lies ahead, progress will not lie in switching everything off: it will lie in consuming more wisely.