Energy Minister Chris Bowen is apparently pushing for a global electrification target of 35 per cent by 2035 – up from around 20 per cent – as part of his $150m Australian taxpayer-funded presidency of the COP31 summit, which will be hosted in Turkey later this year.
If only adapting to climate change was part of the brief, he could make a last-minute change by ditching electrification and replacing it with a more modest, achievable and far more helpful goal: 35 per cent airconditioning penetration in Europe by 2035.
The thousands of unnecessary deaths likely triggered by the latest heatwave in Europe are a reminder of how dangerous, unscientific and arrogant climate change fanatics have become, even as the rest of the world realises “net zero by 2050” is a costly fraud. Despite economic stagnation, European nations remain among the richest in the world and yet airconditioning penetration is not even 20 per cent, thanks to the elite’s hypocritical aversion to one of the greatest innovations of all time.
When the mercury hit high 30s in Brussels last week, the European Commission switched off the airconditioning on the first seven floors, where most of the building’s 3000 staff work, but exempted floors eight to 13, where Her Majesty Ursula von der Leyen, the EC’s president, and her staff were no doubt mulling new ways to save the planet. Let them stay cool!
Cutting back on airconditioning for others in Europe is more about virtue-signalling than reducing emissions. About half of Belgium’s electricity – and around three-quarters of France’s – is generated by nuclear energy, for instance, which produces zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Even American’s supposedly gauche predilection for airconditioning is a rounding error on the global emissions pie chart. Airconditioning globally contributes around 3 per cent of global emissions and the US share isn’t more than a third of that – in other words negligible.
But following the logic of Europe’s climate change zealots can be challenging. Warming the planet is bad, but not the home. Global carbon dioxide emissions from heating are at least four times greater than those for cooling, according to Our World in Data. So, it’s OK to keep your food cool, but not yourself.
In 2024, according to Eurostat data, space cooling made up 0.8 per cent of European household’s energy usage, compared to 77 per cent for space and water heating.
“OMG, this is so rich!” wrote Paris deputy mayor Audrey Pulvar on social media in a comical attempt to hit back at Americans poking fun at Europe’s lack of airconditioning – something 90 per cent of American households have taken for granted for a long time.
“As the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, you bear a significant amount of responsibility for global warming and the consequences,” she fumed earlier this week.
At least here we can observe some degree of understanding that the climate doesn’t care where greenhouse emissions come from. European countries can flaunt their greenhouse emissions statistics all they want, but the global total is still increasing every year as Europe – and Australia – offshore their manufacturing (and jobs) to the rest of the world.
Indeed, if she were serious about pointing the finger over emissions, Pulvar should’ve directed her criticism elsewhere. China, which still insists it is a developing country, has almost 990 million airconditioning units installed, according to Our World in Data. That’s more than four times as many as Europe, resulting in a penetration ratio three times that of Europe.
Its greenhouse emissions footprint is about four times that of the US and growing. Chinese officials no doubt understand what should be obvious: airconditioning not only massively improves the wellbeing of ordinary people but also increases economic growth and productivity, and promotes better learning outcomes too.
If the Europeans were serious about reducing emissions, they would encourage take-up of airconditioning. The amount of carbon emitted for every dollar of economic output has been falling steadily across advanced economies for decades, as innovation makes energy cleaner and more productive. Indeed, airconditioners themselves are a good example of this: quieter, cheaper, cleaner and dramatically more efficient than those of a generation ago.
In drumming up support in Europe for his last-minute change to his COP31 target, Bowen could cite an insightful economic paper from 2013 entitled The Remarkable Decline in US Temperature Mortality Relationship over the 20th Century.
“Residential AC appears to be both the most promising technology to help poor countries mitigate the temperature-related mortality impacts of climate change and, because fossil fuels are the least expensive source of energy, a technology whose proliferation will speed up the rate of climate change,” the report concluded.
No doubt it will be hard for European leaders to read that fossil fuels were – and still are, measured correctly – the cheapest source of energy. But it will be much harder to face being lumped in with “poor countries”, which is almost certainly where they’ll end up if they maintain their mindless obsession with reducing emissions.
