My life history re: heating and cooling
I have been to Europe a handful of times in my life, but I've actually never been anywhere in Europe during the summer. So I was genuinely surprised to learn that many countries in Europe have extremely little air conditioning. I'd never considered running air conditioning any time I was in Europe - including the time I lived in Dublin for three or four months - so I'd never realized it wasn't available.
I was silently reading a lot of the social media fighting about AC during the heat dome over Europe last week. This stuff reminds me of other conversations I've had with friends about the layout and loadout of domestic spaces in their own countries. Do you have a clothes washer? Do you have a balcony or a patio? Does it enclose? Where and how do you dry your clothes? What shape is your shower faucet knob? How many nozzles are in your shower? Is it enclosed separately from the rest of your bathroom? Where do your dishes dry? Where do you leave your shoes?
These kinds of conversations touch on a lot of very deeply-ingrained assumptions about domestic spaces, hygiene, money, and chores, and tend to start fiery arguments where people are proud to misunderstand one another. It can bring people a lot of joy to accuse one another of being barbarians.
For me, air conditioning is brand new. We have a minisplit heat pump. I am still getting used to having it at all. Since leaving my freshman-year college dorm, I think I might have had functional AC for one year in 2014-15, but I think I let my roommate handle all interactions with it? Aside from 14-15, in the last eighteen years, I've lived in:
- One place with AC I was not permitted to use
- One place which may have had only a portable unit, which I cannot remember ever using
- Two dorm buildings without AC
- Four rented apartments without AC (two because of jalousie windows)
- Two places where I cannot recall having or not having AC, because I did not think to touch it even once
- One place where I lived for six years with no AC and got a minisplit later (my current home)
I guess I lived several entire years of my life in places where I needed AC so infrequently that I never even bothered to investigate whether we had it. Very European of me, I suppose.
But it's crazy that this is now, apparently, culture war material. I actually do need AC now, even though I didn't before, because we made it hotter! AC is infrastructure, and you deserve a maximum temperature regulation, in exactly the same way that you deserve to have trains and safe streets and groceries near your house. I barely thought about AC at all until the world got hotter and I needed it. At that point, I wanted it very badly, and I couldn't have it!
My blasé attitude toward AC came from the culture and climate of the place where I grew up, exactly like I assume it has for many other people. Connecticut is older and much colder than most major cities in the US. It was pretty normal for older homes there to lack effective air conditioning. Nevertheless, public hangout spots like malls, libraries, coffeeshops, and movie theaters were heavily air conditioned, and there wasn't a cultural aversion to AC. When I moved to California, I actually became even more blasé about heat and cooling. It's much less humid here, and dry heat is simply safer. In fact, I often deliberately rented units without AC in California because they were cheaper!
I started genuinely wanting AC about seven years ago... but it was impossible to get effective AC of any kind into my apartment, because it had those terrible jalousie windows. I'm sympathetic to people online who are frustrated when Americans tell them to "just install" AC, because I was unable to get over the barriers myself - landlords, windows, etc. It's clearly a problem which most places will only surmount with the help of regulation. Los Angeles County itself only passed a maximum temperature regulation in 2025. It requires that units be cooled to 82F/27.8C by January of next year. I am curious how effective this rule will be - many, many older apartments and rental units in this county lack air conditioning entirely, and landlords are cheap!
Related: Los Angeles has a law requiring soft-story apartment buildings built before 1978 to be retrofitted with modern metal supports to prevent them from collapsing in an earthquake. People are very frightened of earthquakes, so the political will materialized to require these extremely inconvenient, expensive renovations.
When I was living in my all-jalousie apartment, our soft-story retrofit occurred while we were still living in the building. People arrived every day to install giant metal I-beams under my house. I could hear them sawing and drilling away down there if I worked from home!
You can do truly bizarre things to your home if the political will to create those changes materializes... and there's nothing that causes political will to accumulate like the threat of death. As the world gets hotter, your city should change your municipal codes to require air conditioning.
That said, forcing your landlord to install a minisplit is probably actually harder than forcing my landlord to put a giant grid of anti-earthquake I-beams under my floor, because the threat of death is less visually catastrophic. Political will definitely materializes faster when the deaths are maximally terrifying, or paired with visual spectacle.
The last thing I took away from this inventory of my life's relationship with AC was that pretty much the only thing motivating change in LA is the threat of "scary" deaths - traffic violence, earthquakes, fires, etc. I'm curious what we'll go through when heat starts causing more and more "scary" deaths here. It seems like this week in July 2026, there's probably less local political will to truly deliver air conditioning in CA than there is in Germany!