How American Media Is Gaslighting Europeans on Air Conditioning

In the southern foothills of the Italian Alps, the crystal waters of Lago d’Orta have been disturbed by an unfamiliar ritual this month. A small yellow plane dips down to skim the surface of the lake and fill its tank, then hums away to drop its cargo on wildfires.  

Lightning struck Monte Barone, a humble peak that boasts not-so-humble views of taller peaks beyond, on August 3. My boyfriend typically climbs the mountain each year on his birthday, August 5. Instead, for two weeks, we watched from the relative safety of Guardabosone, a small, terracotta-roofed village from which his great-grandfather immigrated to London, and to which his family has returned annually since, as flames crept down toward us. 

By the end of our stay, nearly four square miles had burned, and two other fires had started between Monte Barone and the Swiss border. Smoke obscured views of the ridges around us, and the orange sunlight that landed slanted on the floor mirrored the sort I’ve become increasingly familiar with as a daughter of California, but which this region—typically lush and green until the foliage turns in fall—has not previously known.  

For months, Europe has sweated through the circumstances that birthed the Monte Barone blaze, as well as far larger fires in France and Spain: successive heat waves and drought conditions.  

As we watched the plumes of smoke grow day after day, a thought pounded through my overheated skull. These infernos were entirely foreseen, yet international media spent a whole lot of words on air conditioning (AC) this summer.  

American outlets in particular opined from an unduly high horse. On June 26, the week France recorded its hottest day on record (a record broken the following day), Fox News hosted Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and climate contrarian known for his opposition to conventional policy prescriptions, who chided Europeans for their slow adoption of AC. “We’ve had this technology for more than a century,” Lomborg said, “and Europe doesn’t want to use it mostly because they want to feel virtuous,” adding that European Union energy taxes increase the cost of running AC.  

The same week, Breitbart blasted “left-wing climate change alarmists” for demonizing AC; The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that European “governments prefer that their citizens sweat it out rather than use the modern invention known as air conditioning”; and CNN asked if aircon is “Too ugly, too noisy, too… American?” for the ever-chic French (paradoxically, atop a story that detailed how AC units were in fact flying off of Parisian shelves). Countless publications ran some version of the low-hanging “Europe warms to air conditioning” pun. Others offered more nuanced takes, like that Europeans have different ideas of “physical suffering and sacrifice” than Americans “accustomed to treating temperature in particular and physical distress more broadly as challenges to be fixed rather than states to be endured,” as Thomas Chatterton Williams, who, like me, splits his time between France and the United States, wrote in The Atlantic.  

In an unbelievable feat of journalism, across the political spectrum, the U.S. media frenzy missed the simple, glaringly obvious explanation: Europe is less air-conditioned because it didn’t used to be this hot. It has routinely become so only recently due to human-induced climate change, a problem the United States disproportionately created and whose president regularly calls a “hoax.” 

Until the 2020s, much of northern European experienced few days above 86 degrees Fahrenheit and generally passed summers fine with the cooling measures that pre-AC construction employed: thick stone walls, shutters, and the like. Now, in many buildings, in many communities, that is no longer the case, so Europeans are buying air conditioners—or trying to. During the worst heatwave in Paris this summer, AC units sold out. And as the next approached, police were called to stores as desperate crowds fought over discount models. (Montanans similarly swarmed to buy AC units and fans as record-breaking heat landed in their historically un-air-conditioned living rooms this summer.)  

So, Europeans weren’t sweating on the altar of environmentalism or suffering a predisposition to suffering so much as experiencing unprecedented temperatures and responding accordingly. In southern European countries more accustomed to heat, AC is already more widespread: 70-80 percent of Greek households, for example, have AC, compared to the voraciously, disparagingly cited 20 percent Europe-wide figure.  

From outlets friendly to a president who revived the Republican Party’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra, withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accords (twice), reversed federal investment in renewable energy transitions, and rekindled America’s love affair with coal, the gloating was beyond infuriating; in effect, it shifted the burden of complicity for the over 25,000 heat-related deaths that have been reported in Europe this year from the United States—the world’s largest historical emitter of fossil fuels, whose current administration is seemingly set on defending that title—to the more climate-conscious governance of the fastest-warming continent.  

Granted, before temperatures regularly hit the 90s in Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Berlin, many Europeans viewed AC as an overused, environmentally harmful American luxury. But the bottom line that U.S. media extrapolated—Americans had it right, and Europeans have cooked themselves—also conveniently omitted another key fact: AC is an environmentally harmful American luxury, at least in the way we use it. Americans blast AC more often and more forcefully than is necessary for public safety, or even comfort. My boyfriend, a son of Spain, still recalls living with an American roommate in college who insisted on air conditioning their apartment through the winter months. (Mind you, this was in Providence, Rhode Island, and it was cold outside.)  

AC is also luxurious in the sense that it’s costly. Obviously, AC consumes energy and contributes to climate change. Less obviously, running AC inside can also make air hotter outside: Cooling systems essentially pump heat out of buildings and dump it outdoors, while the electric motors running the show generate added warmth. So, in a city rife with home AC, those who can afford it may enjoy chilled comfort, while lower-income households who can’t pay for climate control swelter even more. (To Lomborg’s point on energy costs in Europe, tens of millions of American households struggle to pay for AC, too.) 

To be sure, more AC in Europe will be necessary to save lives during heatwaves, and European leaders across the political spectrum have come around to that conclusion. But—and this should be obvious—upgrading wide swaths of countries’ public buildings and housing stock to modern cooling technology is complicated and expensive.  

In retrospect, the American entry into the Great European AirCon Bashing of 2026 danced around the clear takeaway: this is the reality that centuries of fossil fuel emissions have delivered us to, and the Trump administration’s approach to climate change will cost countless lives. After-the-fact adaptation measures like AC won’t be enough to protect Europeans, Americans, or citizens of any country from the impacts of more frequent and intense droughts, fires, floods, and storms that climate change is bringing to our communities, and in under two years, Trump’s second term has magnified those consequences immeasurably.

The average American may have experienced more artificially cooled comfort than the average European this summer, but 7.4 million acres have burned in the United States in 2026—more land to-date than any other year this decade, and 171 percent of the 10-year average. Meanwhile, global news coverage of climate change has declined for four years straight.  

These past months have felt like the moment that climate activists have been waiting for: when widespread death, disaster, and discomfort would shake majority constituencies out of complacency, fueling action against leaders’ inaction. Instead, we talked about air conditioning, which most reasonable people already agree Europe needs more of.

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