Is AC right wing? Cooling has entered the culture wars

By 2050 up to a third of British homes could have air conditioning. But at what cost,

- Jonathan Margolis

The weather in most of Britain is back – for now – to a pleasant summer normal, and it’s easy to forget the stifling, sticky-limbed nights of the recent heatwaves we have endured (four this year so far). But is this milder period the perfect time to coolly plan for the inevitable future baking spells and get some home air conditioning?

Like it or not, UK summer temperatures are now regularly exceeding 30C. A decade from now, it's predicted that it will hit 26C or above for 50 nights a year.

Even though the UK has nowhere near the 90 per cent of homes in the US with air conditioning, demand for some kind of relief from the heat is reportedly soaring, with a 64 per cent increase in AC unit sales between 2023 and 2024. The UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) estimates that up to a third of British homes will have aircon by 2050.

This is a fundamental change in the way we live. For decades, anything over 25 in the UK has been proclaimed “a scorcher” by the newspapers. Puzzled American tourists complaining about the lack of AC in Britain would be told wryly that the country is naturally air-conditioned most of the year round.

However, across ever-hotter Europe, when it comes to turning your house into a fridge, there is a large, sweaty elephant in the room. Attacking the climate crisis head-on using technology, with the accompanying summer surge in electricity usage - an extra 7 gigawatts of it, according to the UKERC - is becoming deeply political. People broadly on the right are prepared to put comfort ahead of environmental concerns. People broadly on the left tend to say that aircon is distinctly uncool, almost as if sweating through the summer is our moral comeuppance for humanity's longstanding profligacy.