Carte Blanche: Life, Liberty, and air conditioning

Yusuf Çelik

“Environmental extremists ... wouldn't let you build a house unless it looked like a bird's nest.”

-Ronald Reagan

The 21st century has been an incredible time for medical breakthroughs and technological advancements. For the first time, science is on the verge of curing illnesses and conditions once thought to be death sentences just a few decades ago. Yet despite these scientific breakthroughs, easily preventable deaths still exist in growing numbers. In 2024, over 94,000 Americans died from complications caused by diabetes. Over 166,000 died from suffering a stroke, and more than 116,000 died from Alzheimers Disease. Still, none of these could eclipse one of the leading causes of death in Europe. While cancer and stroke are no doubt serious issues there, death by heat stroke topped over 175,000 in 2024.

Although diet and exercise can help prevent or mitigate a great many illnesses, it can be difficult getting people to commit to these lifestyle changes. Heat stroke, however, is quite easily prevented. In fact, the technology is well over a century old and readily available; it’s called air conditioning. As anyone born and raised in the southern US can vouch, it makes life bearable in places where otherwise it would not be possible. But growing concerns over climate change, rising temperatures, and, the drain on already burdened power grids mean that European politicians and climate activists have been discouraging its wide-scale adoption and use.

France is an example of cultural distrust toward air conditioning, alongside government regulation meant to discourage its widespread use. While only 25% of the country has it in their homes, that number is quickly growing. However, entrenched disdain for something seen as ugly and American persists and is only compounded by environmentalist green parties committed to decreasing the nation's energy consumption and pushing a doubling down on green energy policies aimed at ending reliable power sources such as gas, coal, and nuclear.

An idea has gripped the Western world's academics, activists, and large swaths of its political class. The idea is one of deindustrialization and denouncing anything deemed harmful to the environment. To abandon progress in hopes of repairing the damage done to the planet by human beings and greedy capitalists in particular. There is a natural homeostasis in nature, according to their prevailing wisdom, that must be fostered and restored, and no cost is too high; money and lives are all to be sacrificed at the altar of their high-minded idealism. But it raises an important question: what is the point of preserving this ideal Earth, which arguably has never existed, if the cost is detrimental or even catastrophic to the human race as a whole? Such a question is never really entertained.

The First World War was a true catastrophe for millions of people, shattering the fragile peace that had lasted almost fifty years. Empires fell and in their ashes rose totalitarian and socialist regimes that would ravage the world even worse in less than thirty years. Out of that war also came scientific achievements such as those pioneered by Fritz Haber. He was a controversial figure who was both the father of chemical warfare and the creator of the process to produce ammonia, which led to farming practices that drastically increased crop yields and fed billions of people in the past century. However, it eventually led to the erosion of the topsoil that farmers depend upon, as does all of humanity, to produce those same crops.

But that should not mean that he is responsible for irreversible harm. On the contrary, he ensured that others were alive to better understand and pioneer even more successful practices to increase plant health, yields, and the variety of the food we eat today and will eat in the future. The point to take from his discovery is that, although it was eventually proven to be detrimental to soil health, it enabled other beneficial discoveries and was a necessary step in making that progress possible. More people can live and develop new ways of farming and environmentalism because of him. Most importantly, nothing comes without sacrifices or trade-offs. To believe otherwise is to believe in fairy tales.

Of all the nation builders and statesmen in the last few centuries, none were as pragmatic, had as much forethought, or were as successful as Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore. He took a backwater city in the middle of a swamp and turned it into one of the most advanced and wealthiest nations to have ever existed in one lifetime. From the moment he took office as Prime Minister, he understood the need to leverage every advantage he could to achieve two things: quality of life and productivity. One leads into the other, and he completely grasped this. He made sure that air conditioning was added to government buildings almost immediately after taking power in 1959, to ensure civil servants could work longer hours in a comfortable environment. Without it, most of Singapore ground to a halt after lunch.

In fact, when asked what he believed made Singapore so successful, the ex-prime minister credited the technology above almost anything else. “Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.” The heat impacted every part of life, as it still does today in places that have little to no air conditioning. Saudi Arabia and the UAE also rely heavily on air conditioning, with 99% of homes having it. It is easy to see how drastically it has shaped life in such warm and dry places. Those nations have become hubs of trade and productivity thanks to, among other things, air conditioning.

The debate on climate change, its effects, and how to handle it is likely to continue to be hotly contested. But just because it’s going to raise the temperatures of those who debate it, that doesn’t mean the world should follow suit. The answer to most of the problems, from heat waves to rising sea levels, has been solved by Singapore and the Netherlands. Climate change will continue to be hotly contested as the climate shifts and issues arise; there are already answers of how to deal with the problems humanity has long faced.

Keeping people cool so that the heat of the day doesn’t kill them should not be a political issue or a decision left up to a bureaucrat. Nor, as happened at the EU headquarters in Brussels, should cool comfort be reserved for the aristocrats or the politicians; it should be available to all people. What were once the words of Thomas Paine, “Give me liberty or give me death.” The battle cry of today should be liberty and air conditioning, or else.