No One Likes It That Hot
Or how regressive environmentalists are making British summers the worst
I’ve just returned from a sunny holiday abroad, only to discover that had I stayed put in London I would have at least matched - if not exceeded - the eastern Mediterranean temperatures I had been enjoying. Albeit with less sea and fewer beach clubs.
Yet too many friends of mine have not been particularly enjoying our barmy British ‘second summer’ this September. Why? Because unlike more developed countries, too much of the UK is yet to discover air conditioning.
We see this phenomenon play out each year on social media - where visitors from richer countries are surprised to see how much hotter 30 odd degrees feels in the UK, compared to other more developed parts of the world.
“The weather in the UK is something else. 28 degrees in Britain is different to 28 degrees in Australia” explains one confused Australian TikToker.
“One thing I still don’t understand is how it’s 70 degrees but it feels so much hotter than that” complains an American - presumably using Fahrenheit unless I really have missed something extraordinary.
The difference, of course, is air conditioning.
Despite the magic cooling technology now being over 100 years old, it is a rarity to find the apparatus, so standard across the United States, in British houses and apartments. Curiously the tech is now delivered as standard in our cars when it was once a luxury, yet this same progress has not taken place in our homes.
Of course new homes sell for far higher prices than the cost of the materials and labour required to build them, yet despite these margins we are not installing as standard systems that can cool as well as heat our houses. We are not following richer countries in delivering what should be seen as basic creature comforts.
We’re paying for more, and getting less.
But why? Obviously a part of this is the fault of Clement Attlee - who broke our planning system to such a degree that developers can get away with the worst quality and people will still buy what they build, thanks to the government’s artificial and arbitrary restrictions on the supply of land. When it’s a seller’s market, product quality falls through the floor.
When it’s a buyer’s market, however, with developers competing for buyer’s custom rather than vice versa, quality rises. That means planning reform leads to not just lower prices but better build quality too.
However, the UK’s pathological opposition to air conditioning is not just the fault of Clement Attlee (and all Prime Ministers who followed him and failed to repeal his detestable Town and Country Planning Act).
There’s a more insidious attitude too - what J. Storrs Hall coins as “ergophobia”;1 a fear of (using more) energy. The belief that we must use less energy as a good thing in and of itself doesn’t really make any sense at all. Especially when you think about it for more than two seconds. Energy is what has transformed our lives - and is in and of itself an unalloyed good. Energy has made us hyper productive and enabled scientific advances that would seem like magic to people living just a couple of hundred years ago.
This insidious aversion to energy isn’t just a general attitude, it’s hard wired into politicians’ plans for our built environment. Take the London Plan - the Mayor’s comprehensive framework for how the UK’s capital city is built. It explicitly states that air conditioning systems are “not desirable”.
In the Plan’s own words (emphasis mine):
“The increased use of air conditioning systems is not desirable as these have significant energy requirements and, under conventional operation, expel hot air, thereby adding to the urban heat island effect.”
Energy requirements are set out first and foremost as the reason to not deliver air conditioning, with a nod to the “urban heat island effect” in there too for good measure. An effect that no hot city on the face of the planet sees as being reason enough to not use air conditioning.
Imagine if we applied the same ‘energy requirements’ logic to heating our homes in the winter. “Sorry Doris, you are asking to heat your home too warmly this winter. The Mayor of London cannot possibly allow it.”
And as the Centre for Cities’ Ant Breach has noted, the government’s own building regulations state that “mechanical cooling may only be used where insufficient heat is capable of being removed from the indoor environment without it.”
Yes, the overwhelming reason we are so uncomfortable in the summer is that our governments - both national and local - have planned it that way.
We simply cannot be allowed to use energy to alter the temperature too much. Sure, in any developed country elsewhere it’s okay, but not in Britain.
Indeed the ergophobic lobby have been winning in the UK for some time. Energy use per person in the UK - once ahead of all other rich countries in Europe, is now joint lowest in the G7. This is not a good thing.
We are suffering from an extreme case of regressive environmentalism. The sort of environmentalism that seeks to force us to just stop doing things. To halt this, restrict that, and reduce the way we live our lives.
There are other ways to do environmentalism. I would be so bold as to suggest that there is such a thing as progressive environmentalism. Instead of saying “stop that, restrict that, turn that off”, progressive environmentalism can be all about delivering energy abundance: creating so many new forms of clean energy that we have a wonderful bounteous oversupply. Making energy too cheap to meter.
Sadly, progressive environmentalism is opposed, both by regressive environmentalists and by the right.
While progressive market environmentalists want wind farms, solar farms, and a wave of new nuclear power stations, anti-progress forces on the right and the left team up to stop it happening. An anti-growth coalition if you will.
The same coalition of Lib Dems, Labour MPs, Tories, and Greens(!) who organised over the past thirteen years to stymie HS2 until it became one of the most expensive and delayed railways in the world have organised to block solar farms and even offshore wind farm infrastructure. And let’s not even mention thirty years of prevarication on nuclear power.
And as with the mind numbingly self sabotaging (sleeper agent?) Greens hand in hand with faith and flag Tories over solar farms, so too a peculiar coalition has formed among the anti-air conditioning green left, and the right.
Why? Heat pumps.
We could deliver air conditioning to every new home as standard, if each new home was built with a two way heat pump as standard. Good modern heat pumps are just two way air conditioners. If we were to install modern heat pumps we would be delivering exactly the kind of progressive environmentalism we need. The kind that makes our lives better, not worse.
Heat pumps can pump lovely hot air into our homes when it’s even as cold as -29 degrees outside. Yet maddeningly this remarkable market innovation has been so proactively campaigned against - almost uniquely in the UK, and especially annoyingly in well insulated new builds, we are at the back of the pack.
So instead here we stand with the worst of both worlds. An anti growth coalition preventing new energy generation and air conditioning. Short-sighted politicians on the left warning off cooler homes in the summer because they are either too myopic to see that more energy use is in no conceivable way a bad thing once we have decarbonised the grid, and politicians on the right buying into anti-science fear campaigns against heat pumps.
We shouldn’t settle for 20th century heating, and zero cooling. Britain needs to get past the anti-innovation left and right. We need to get over our aversion to energy abundance. And we need to do it all quickly.
It would be unimaginable to build a house in the 21st century without heating. I wonder what would have happened had the oil crisis and associated post-1970s wave of ergophobia instead taken place decades earlier. Would the UK would see Very Serious People arguing against central heating systems on the grounds that they use too much energy, and we only really need to suffer for a couple of weeks a year?
As things stand each and every summer we live as if we are not a first world nation.
And our lack of foresight and poor government planning inevitably leads to the grotesque chaos of the owners of newly built apartments purchasing less efficient and more unsightly mobile air conditioning units to clutter up their new homes.
As our summers heat up, the case for widespread AC becomes more and more of a slam dunk. Our aversion to using energy to cool ourselves down has to end. Using energy is good and it should be seen as such.
We shouldn’t put up with the absurd spectacle of wafting ice or superstitiously drinking hot tea as if we’re living in the 1800s. It’s just embarrassing. Air conditioning is normal in much of the world. Is normal really too much to ask for?
I really enjoyed J. Storrs Hall’s Where Is My Flying Car? even if it does get a tad too nerdy on flying device specifics. It’s a good read overall and I’d recommend it - and its key point that we have lost a big sense of progress (faster travel, flying cars, space etc) since we stopped using more energy in the 1970s.
Brilliant read, so many good points made. 'Fear of using energy' is driving Britain into the ground when 'creating lots of cheap clean energy' makes so much more sense. And yes I think we are lucky central heating is not a new idea or it would prob be banned! 👍👍👍
My view is this all comes back to the current planning system including the way that developers have to pay financial contributions (S106 & CIL) which is so often wasted. I know of a village crossroads that is having £5.5m spent on it from developer contributions, it will have no improvement on traffic flow and will just be a visual improvement. Millions of pounds are wasted that could actually be put in to a better product for home buyers.
The planning system also needs to stop being like going to the casino, the high risk creates demands for higher rewards and the team producing the information for the application demand higher fees.
In short, make it cheaper to get planning and I think the product will improve.