Nathan Gardels at Noema:
Recently, Elon Musk stirred controversy across a sweltering Europe simply by tweeting on X that Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, was a “genius” because he had the vision to see that introducing air conditioning would entirely change what was possible in the post-colonial tropics and make the city-state he ruled as prosperous as the imperial West.
The biting subtext of Musk’s post was ridicule of the Continent’s general anti-tech sentiment even when facing heat-stroke temperatures of 100-plus degrees. In France, where only 25% of homes have air conditioning, compared to 90% in the United States, the issue of adopting AC or not has divided the body politic between climate adapters and cultural traditionalists — despite the fact that the country is largely powered by the most technologically advanced renewable resource, nuclear energy. No doubt, stiff preservation rules and renovation red tape play a role in stalling updates in a centuries-old built environment.
European reticence seems grounded in the notion that the climate is natural while conditioning it is the kind of tech fix associated with big-living Texas trillionaires who admire authoritarian leaders and the extravagant overconsumption of Americans. AC, in the minds of some, appears to be a proxy for all that is wrong with America.
More here.
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