Europeans Need Air Conditioning. Their Own Dogma Traps Them.

Three years ago, London went through a 40‑degree summer. My friend Thomas lived in an old Victorian apartment in Kensington. The windows cracked open a sliver, and by eleven at night the indoor temperature still stuck at 34 degrees. He ordered a machine off Amazon. It arrived on the third day. He plugged it in, and for the first time in a week, his bedroom was fit for human sleep. The label said “Portable Air Cooler.” Not an air conditioner. Legally, it was not one.

I asked Thomas, do a lot of people around you have these? He said over the last two years, maybe half the building had bought one, but no one said it out loud. When people talked about it, they called it “just a fan.” Then he added: “You know, for a while, the local forum said that anyone who installs a fixed air conditioner in their flat is far‑right.”

That sentence is where my entire understanding of the European air‑conditioning problem begins.

1. Why a normal person still sweats at 40 degrees

Africa can’t install air conditioning because the grid can’t handle it. India can’t afford it. That’s a wallet problem. Britain, France, Germany — these countries don’t have an affordability problem. Yet heatwaves kill people every summer, and the penetration rate of fixed air conditioning stays absurdly low. After each summer, the same media narrative comes back: “Europe has a mild climate and doesn’t need air conditioning,” “Air conditioning destroys the environment.”

The most common answer is: the woke left, environmentalism. That answer is no answer at all. Push one step further: Why must the woke left oppose air conditioning?

Trace the simplest logic chain: It gets hot → people want air conditioning → air conditioning becomes widespread → electricity grid load explodes → you need more power stations, more grid infrastructure, more energy → you need more engineers, more construction projects, more efficient permitting systems. If every problem gets a technical fix, the public unconsciously forms a mindset: whoever gets things done is good. Results‑based thinking, materialism. Whoever builds more power plants so I can have cool air, I’ll vote for them.

The problem is, over the last thirty years, Europe — especially Britain and France — already dismantled the first half of that chain. Thatcher‑era deindustrialisation and Mitterrand‑era offshoring moved huge numbers of physical factories to Asia. The old progressive left’s base was industrial workers. The factories left, the working class shrank, and their parties had to find a new way to survive. They embraced finance, media, the culture industry, the environmental movement, and identity politics. In plain English, people call this “woke culture.”

The old progressive left stood on steel and coal and proved its superiority with output. Your steel plant produces a million tons a year; mine produces five million — therefore I am more progressive. That was a materialist contest. The new woke left has no steel plants left. How do they prove they are more progressive than you? They stage a moral performance. You eat meat, I’m a vegan, so I care more about life. You don’t worry about your carbon footprint; I don’t even use air conditioning, so I’m greener. You don’t have a rescue dog; I’ve adopted three, so I have more compassion. The mode of proving progressiveness has shifted from “what we can build” to “what we can refuse.”

Once you understand this, you understand why the opposition to air conditioning must be an environmental issue and absolutely cannot be an electricity issue. If the framework becomes “we just need to build enough nuclear power stations and offshore wind farms, and then air conditioning is perfectly fine,” the public immediately asks: who can build those nuclear plants? Who is good at big infrastructure? The answer is not the woke left. The answer is those political forces that emphasize national capacity, technological sovereignty, and performance‑based governance — people tend to call them the new right, or the techno‑right. Elon Musk is the global poster child for this current of thought.

Admitting that “when it’s hot you should have air conditioning” opens the door for the opposition’s narrative. So that cannot be allowed. You have to insist, through gritted teeth, that “air conditioning is not needed.” Europeans don’t not feel the heat. Their body temperature has been conscripted into an ideological defensive war.

2. The loophole De’Longhi’s “Portable Air Cooler” walked through

Take De’Longhi. Everything becomes clear.

De’Longhi is headquartered in Treviso. It made its name with coffee machines and also makes heaters and air conditioners. Faced with a vast, strange gap in the European market — consumers frantically searching on Amazon for “how to cool a room without an outdoor unit” — it did one thing. It took a product originally called a “portable air conditioner” and, on certain channels and packaging, labelled it a “Portable Air Cooler,” or highlighted its function as a “dehumidifier.” Visually, it’s a little cabinet on wheels, with an exhaust hose trailing out the back that you can tuck into the gap of a window. No outdoor unit, no damage to the building façade, no need to ask the property manager for installation permission. Plug it in, and the room gets cold.

Strictly speaking, it really is an air conditioner. But legally, it bypassed all the approval barriers aimed at “fixed‑installation air conditioning systems.” All those complex regulations about heritage building protection, environmental refrigerant quotas, and professional installation qualifications — they couldn’t touch it. Because it is defined as a movable home appliance, with roughly the same legal status as a standing fan.

De’Longhi didn’t issue a press release saying “actually, Europe is also very hot.” It didn’t challenge Brussels’ building energy performance directives. It didn’t debate environmental ethics with Green party politicians. It simply saw the specific person tossing and turning, unable to sleep, in that old Kensington flat, in that Parisian attic, in that post‑war Munich block. And it handed them a machine on wheels. Demand doesn’t speak. Demand votes with the order button on Amazon. The data does not debate you. Over the last five years, sales of portable air conditioners in Europe have surged, while the installation numbers for fixed units are practically a flat line.

This is what it means to hack the loophole. Don’t stand at the cathedral door shouting at the people chanting scripture. Walk around the whole cathedral and knock directly on the doors of those who can’t stand the heat.

3. Anyone can use this “essence filter”

The De’Longhi story isn’t a special case for the home‑appliance industry. It’s a way of thinking you can migrate to almost any domain. If you are an individual living, working, and trying to get things done in Western society, this method saves you a huge amount of energy wasted on pointless debates.

First, trust your body over the “scripture.” The media says, “This year’s high temperatures are an anomaly; there’s no need to change your lifestyle.” Touch the sweat on the back of your neck. Forty degrees is forty degrees. All large‑scale ideological lies are most afraid of the most primitive bodily sensation. You feel hot, and millions of other people feel just as hot as you. That’s demand. Don’t use other people’s theories to deny your own body temperature. Use your own body temperature to test other people’s theories.

Second, treat a heavily moralized prohibition as a signpost and immediately look in the opposite direction for a crack of material interest. When a voice tells you “using air conditioning is a moral failure,” don’t start reflecting on whether you aren’t green enough. Ask an engineering question: what is the heat load of this room, and what wattage of cooling equipment is needed? Then ask a political‑economy question: who least wants me to get this equipment? Why? You’ll quickly find that behind those moral high notes sits a group of people who cannot prove themselves through performance. Peel off the moral mask, and underneath is all naked material interests and electoral anxiety.

Third, don’t be a debater; be a person who plugs it in and turns it on. Thomas didn’t go onto the community forum to write a long post defending the moral legitimacy of air conditioning. He placed the order, it arrived, he plugged it in, and he went to sleep. De’Longhi didn’t lobby the European Union to amend its building directives. It found a product definition not yet covered by the regulations and stuffed the machine right in there. You don’t need to convince the people who make the rules. You just need to find the narrow space that the rules haven’t had time to define yet and put a genuinely useful thing inside it. Let it grow on its own. It could be a portable air conditioner. It could be an information channel that bypasses legacy media. It could be any tool that directly serves a concrete need.

Epilogue: Deindustrialisation didn’t just remove the factories

Britain is a very good case study. After the Thatcher era tore down the coal mines and the steel mills, vast regions of the Midlands and the North lost not just jobs, but a cultural habit of “getting things done.” When a whole generation no longer makes any tangible, physical product, their worldview irreversibly slides from “what can we build” to “what are you not allowed to do.” The traders in the City and the columnists in the media don’t have to face the hard metrics of steel output. They just need to hold the high ground on moral interpretation.

But the heat does not wait for your debate to finish. On the day London hit forty degrees, all the elegant commentary about “Europe doesn’t need air conditioning” shattered into pieces in front of an ordinary person drenched in sweat.

For those who still want to get things done, the answer is never inside the cathedral. The answer is in the hands of the person carrying a wrench and a cooling machine, who walks around the crowd reciting scripture and gently knocks on your door. He doesn’t care if you’re far‑right. He doesn’t care about your carbon‑footprint spreadsheet. He just sees that the temperature in your room has passed thirty degrees, and he makes that number drop.

That simple, engineer‑like kindness is the best hack of our era.