From my desk in London, I’ve watched Los Angeles with a jolt of recognition. As dangerous heat settles over the city, it’s opening more than a hundred cooling centers and running air-conditioned buses to reach people with nowhere cool to go. It’s a lifesaving response to a growing problem. It’s also a quiet admission: For many Angelenos, staying cool at home has become a luxury.
The same admission is playing out where I live. Last month’s heat wave killed an estimated 440 people per day at its peak in England and Wales — more than a hundred times the daily toll from road crashes in a country that still treats heat as a freak event rather than something to plan for. This summer alone, families fled a wildfire down Conwy Mountain in Wales, and water-bombers scooped from Paris’ Seine for the first time to save the forest at Fontainebleau.
Call it the air-con divide: The household that can afford an air-conditioning unit rides out the heat; the family next door, in an uninsulated rental, does not. The divide widens with every heat wave — a slow sorting of who’s safe by who can afford to pay. Los Angeles County is trying to legislate its way out of this issue, requiring landlords to keep rooms coolable to a maximum temperature of 82 degrees — though small property landlords who own 10 or fewer dwellings need to cool just one room until 2032.
Europe insisted for decades that it didn’t need air conditioning. Now, panicked, the continent is installing units as fast as it can — though even so, only a fifth of European homes have one. And Europe is only a late arrival to a worldwide rush: globally, air-conditioning use is on track to triple by 2050, with 10 new units sold every second for the next three decades — sprinting toward the very model that’s already failing everywhere else it’s been tried.
Air conditioning isn’t the enemy. It saves lives, cutting heat deaths by an estimated 75%, and no one sweating through a sleepless night should be guilt-shamed for switching it on. The mistake is designing cities that need more and more of it every year. Cooling should be the last line of defense, not the first, and America shows why. In Phoenix, where nearly every home has a unit, heat still killed hundreds last year — most of the indoor deaths involved incidents where air conditioning wasn’t running. A machine that isn’t working isn’t providing protection. And the units that do run constantly can overwhelm the grid at the exact moment people need it most: more than 10,000 Southern Californians lost power during a single heat wave in September 2024, while cooling drawn from a fossil-fueled grid only feeds the heat it’s meant to hold back.
The better answers are coming from the places Washington, D.C., and Brussels don’t think to look. After a 2010 heat wave killed more than a thousand people, Ahmedabad, India, built South Asia’s first Heat Action Plan: early warnings, roofs whitewashed to throw back the sun, shaded water points, hospitals drilled for the worst days. The plan now saves well more than a thousand lives a year, at a fraction of the cost of a city full of air conditioners, and dozens of Indian cities have copied it. So, this February, did Los Angeles County — its new Heat Action Plan borrows the same name and the same logic, more than a decade on.
Sarawak, the Malaysian state on Borneo, is solving the other half of the problem before it starts. Running primarily on hydropower, it’s courting the data centers and AI campuses becoming some of the thirstiest cooling users on Earth — betting that even the most demanding cooling can run clean if the grid is built right first. It’s Ahmedabad’s principle from the opposite direction: Don’t wait for people to buy their way out of the heat one machine at a time. Build the system so the fix doesn’t become the fuel.
The alternative to the air-con divide isn’t asking people to suffer through the hottest summers on record. It’s treating cooling like clean water: public infrastructure, not a personal purchase.
The Global South has shown it can be done without waiting for every household to buy a unit and for every grid to strain under it. Los Angeles is starting to prove it too. For cities on both sides of the Atlantic, that means enforcing cooling standards in rentals instead of letting landlords drift a decade past deadline, building shade and passive cooling into the schools and care homes that need it most and moving the grid onto clean power, so that cooling our homes stops heating the planet.
We’ve spent years reaching for the easy, unequal fix. The rich world — mine included — should stop lecturing everyone else on how to survive the heat, and start taking notes.
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