The geopolitics of air-conditioning

Heatwaves are making access to AC a political problem around the world

On a sun-baked morning in early July, with temperatures set to soar above 40°C (104°F), a mob in Nanterre, a Paris suburb, heaved against the doors of a Lidl supermarket until they collapsed. The sweat-stained hooligans were desperate shoppers, pitted against each other for the last portable air-conditioning (AC) unit. In another Lidl across town two men came to blows. French politicians had a row of their own, over how much AC was too much.

At about the same time in cities across Pakistan and Bangladesh, protesters blocked roads and surrounded electricity offices during weeks of power cuts in temperatures as hot as 45°C. In Chandpur, Bangladesh, in late June residents allegedly assaulted an employee of the Rural Electrification Board. In May power cuts during a heatwave in India led to similar protests in some rural villages, where residents complained they could not even run fans at night. In places like Iraq and Sri Lanka, too, unrest has broken out over shortages of energy needed to keep cool.

As extreme heat breaks tempers and electricity grids, fights over AC—or the energy that powers cooling tech—are threatening to break politics. It is a decidedly modern problem: AC hardly existed even in America before 1960; now climate change has made it a near-absolute must in much of the world. In November the COP30 climate summit, held in Belém, Brazil, declared cooling technologies like air-conditioning to be “essential infrastructure” like water, energy and sanitation.

Of all extreme weather, high temperatures are overwhelmingly the most deadly. Between 2000 and 2019 an estimated 489,000 people died of heat each year, according to modelling published in the Lancet, a medical journal. AC has proved a strikingly effective response. A separate study in the Lancet estimates that by the early 2020s AC was averting around 190,000 deaths each year in people aged 65 or older. In America researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research reckon that residential AC was responsible for a roughly 75% decline over the 20th century in the risk of dying on a very hot day, defined as above 27°C on average. Almost all of that decline came after 1960, when American households began to adopt AC.

All that might seem to lead to a straightforward political calculus: more AC for everyone, everywhere. But it has not proved so simple. In rich countries politicians fight about climate and energy-efficiency. In poor countries, about the price of electricity, and ageing, rickety electric grids. And everywhere, they must contend with a public that increasingly expects, or outright demands, access to AC.

Take the rich countries first. Populist-right figures spy a clear opportunity in the hazy heat. In June Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Rally, demanded more air-conditioners in the country’s schools, hospitals and care homes. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, her rival on the populist left, countered that “air-conditioning everywhere” would heat up the planet, thereby only “increasing the damage”. Globally, cooling produces around 4% of greenhouse-gas emissions. The UN expects demand for AC and refrigeration to more than triple by 2050 on current trends, nearly doubling those emissions again.

Even in climate-controlled America, where 90% of households have AC, the MAGA right has tried to score cool points. On July 1st Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist mayor of New York, called on New Yorkers to set their AC to 78°F (26°C) to protect the power grid from overloading during a heatwave. Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, mockingly wrote in response, “In a first-world country you could turn on the AC…”. Others noted that Mr Cruz’s home state routinely issues the same guidance to protect its grid.

Ms Le Pen, at least, has more than populism on her side. Europe is both wealthy and temperate for its latitude. Yet it is, by a large margin, the region where heat kills most disproportionately, the Lancet model finds: 36% of the world’s heat deaths are attributed to Europe, which is home to less than 10% of the world’s people. And the annual death toll is rising. The World Health Organisation says it has gone up by 30% in two decades. Some of that is because Europeans are older, and the old are more vulnerable to heat. And some is because Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent. But many deaths are from the lack of AC. The International Energy Agency notes that just 23% of European households have an AC unit (see chart).

In poor countries, most of which are in hot climates, the politics of AC will get a lot stickier. Both their populations and their governments face formidable budget constraints when adopting cooling technology: AC units are expensive, energy is often expensive, and upgrading grids is expensive. Though more than 80% of the world’s population regularly encounter the kind of heat for which cooling is needed, just 40% of those people are able to get AC.

The greatest gap is in the poorest, hottest countries. India is quickly adding AC units: some 50m between 2019 and 2024, or half of the total for Europe. The India Energy and Climate Centre (IECC) at the University of California, Berkeley, expects the country to add another 130m-150m units over the coming decade.

Most of those will go to richer households. Many poorer Indians are turning to rentals during the hottest months, with some going into debt to do so. The electricity costs a lot too: the poorest households in poor countries like India spend up to 8% of their income on cooling electricity, compared with 0.2-2.5% for rich households worldwide. Poor households also face a double-whammy in efficiency: the cheapest machines gobble up more electricity, and are being cranked up in the leakiest, worst-insulated homes.

And those inefficient units are often on grids already stretched to breaking point. AC units account for perhaps a quarter of India’s peak electricity demand; on current trends, the country’s peak-energy consumption for just cooling could triple to 180 gigawatts by 2035. The IECC warns of electricity shortages from 2028 even if every plant under construction is finished. Indian peak power demand hit a record high this May, bringing power cuts, burned-out transformers and costly reliance on the spot market for electricity.

Grid-blocked

Power cuts cluster in heatwaves—when electricity demand peaks—leaving people who have grown accustomed to AC both unprotected and unacclimatised. Unreliable supply also corrodes the economics of adoption from both ends. Households face a choice of paying for machines they will not always be able to use. And electricity firms, which are mostly state-owned in places like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, sink deeper into debt when they make loss-making spot purchases in response to spikes in electricty demand. That in turn saps their ability to invest in sorely needed grid improvements. Such firms are also in a tough political bind. When they do cut power to ease the load on grids, governments suddenly face mass protests.

Protesters in such poor, hot countries often accuse their governments of hoarding electricity for their own buildings or for richer customers, including (in places like India) big industrial firms. They want electricity distributed more fairly and, where it is not subsidised, more cheaply. Such policies are difficult to execute when grids are rickety: the cheaper and more widely available electricity is, and the more that customers run AC on cheap units, the faster that grids will fail.

Countries that cannot afford to invest in grids, and in AC, risk entering a self-reinforcing spiral. In 2009 Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, famously cited AC as one of the most influential inventions in history for “making development possible in the tropics”. Lee’s city-state became rich for a host of other reasons, but AC helped things along. Without AC many other hot countries will fall further behind. In eastern and southern Africa, UNICEF reckons that over-hot classrooms (along with other climate shocks) have interrupted schooling for 130m children. The International Labour Organisation estimates that by 2030 heat stress will erase 2.2% of the world’s working hours—the equivalent of 80m full-time jobs—with the losses concentrated among agricultural workers in South Asia and west Africa.

The rich world can help. Rich countries could include the cost of AC in heatwaves as a factor in determining how much to help poor countries pay for adaptation to climate change. Rich governments could also support bulk-buying of efficient AC units. Development banks could finance storage and distribution of electricity to shore up failing grids. And patent-holders could license next-generation refrigerants affordably, greatly lowering the cost of hyper-efficient AC units.

So far they are doing rather less. More than 70 countries have signed a Global Cooling Pledge, promising to cut cooling-related emissions, raise the efficiency of new AC units and expand access to sustainable cooling. And a “Beat the Heat” drive aims to put “access to cooling” in 50 national adaptation plans by 2030.

But such efforts focus more on fixes like passive cooling, such as better insulation, than on, say, buying or subsidising AC units for the poor (though in France Ms Le Pen has advocated doing so). Capital remains in scarce supply. The International Finance Corporation, a lending arm of the World Bank, says closing today’s cooling-access shortfall in emerging markets would take $400bn-800bn.

For some in the rich world, like Mr Mélenchon, there remains a stubborn squeamishness about adapting to rising temperatures with AC. (Al Gore, America’s former vice-president, called reliance on adaptation a “kind of laziness”.)

But the market is quickly passing the French hard-left leader by. This summer Chinese air-conditioner exports to the EU rose by 43% year-on-year, to $3.8bn. The bestseller is a portable unit made to comply with European rules that restrict drilling façades; one Austrian drove 200km for the last one in stock. The fight over how much AC the public should have has already been lost in the stampede to buy it.■